Obviously, Aristotle and I had very different educations, and so what I'm about to touch on may just be a difference in time, perspective, thought process, and/or culture.

It is difficult for me to view this piece as a universal foundation for rhetoric when the author a) alters the definition of terms throughout the piece, b) alters the relationship between those terms throughout the piece, and c) believes only a certain type of person is capable of mastering this.

That being said, he lost me a lot. When my mind doesn't have a stable definition to hang on to for a word or term, I reach for context or connecting terms. Rather than building a replicable structure with blocks labeled 'syllogism', 'enthymeme', 'rhetoric', 'dialectic', 'paradigm', 'induction', 'proposition', etc.; he just threw all those terms in a bowl and labeled it rhetoric salad. He seemed to stab a couple things together on one fork whenever they just happened to be near each other. At one point, he paired 'enthymeme' with 'rhetoric' and then 'induction' with 'dialectic' (40), but later he swaps them around leaving me lost as to how any of them are related. I tried to follow his logic in section 11 on 32-3: artistic method--> pisteis--> demonstration--> enthymeme--> syllogism--> ? Was his entire point to equate logic with truth?

There are few moments where Aristotle briefly mentions the qualities one must have to understand and use rhetoric. For instance, in section 7 on page 39, he discusses qualities that one should be able to learn, but it reads more like he only believes a certain kind of person is inherently capable of comprehending. He writes, "to grasp an understanding of [pisteis] is the function of one who can form...". He doesn't write that one can learn it but that it is already one's "function". Maybe this instance can be worked out in translation, but it's not the only time he limits who can and can't grasp the subject. Lastly, I was jarred by the excerpts from Book 2. They were just paragraphs of massive oversimplifications of large groups of people based on age or birth or luck. It sounded more like Aristotle venting about the half-baked and over-baked members of society, and I didn't much connection back to persuasion.

I realize that this post is mostly of a critique of the text, but I feel that I need to go through this process of evaluation before I take a stance on the ideas presented.