ABSTRACT
Anyhow the Antidosis proves that dialectic, or what Isocrates always calls ‘eristic’, had been a part of the Academy’s curriculum for young men for at least a little while before 354/3.
No one, I fancy, doubts that Aristotle began to teach parts of the contents of our Topics in his quite early teaching years in the Academy. The Topics is an ‘Art’ or training manual in the questioner-answerer disputation-exercise, and both in his Topics and in his Art of Rhetoric Aristotle closely associates the study of rhetoric with the study of dialectic. In his Art of Rhetoric Aristotle frequently talks as if his rhetoric students are quite familiar with the terminology and the practice of dialectic, i.e. as if they are learning both ‘arts’ together. Both book of the Topics and Rhetoric
6-7 give instruction in the types of arguments to be employed in order to establish the goodnesses and the comparative goodnesses of various types of things; their instructions are pretty similar and in several points identical. The version in the Topics shows only slightly greater technical sophistication than the version in the Rhetoric.
