By the end of this month, all of you will be able to purchase that fascinating textbook, Argumentation: Critical Thinking in Action, published through iUniverse. Get one for yourself, and several for your friends! And, they make a nice alternative to those run-of-the-mill baby or wedding shower gifts. Just go to www.iUniverse.com. Best of all, 20 percent of the sale price goes to a very worthy local charity. (OK, that charity is me--but I need the dough!)
Despite the relief connected to finishing that particular project, one also develops a nagging feeling that "I could have done better." Or worse, that "I made some mistakes." But you know what? People who are better, smarter, and more famous than I (are any of those things even possible? ha ha) have made mistakes, too.
Take our old friend Aristotle. (I know him well, so I just call him "Ari.") Turns out his famous book on rhetoric (a "Bible" of sorts for those of us in communication studies) has statements that are just plain wrong, or totally silly!
In book I, chapter 7 of The Rhetoric, Ari says: "If the largest member of one class surpasses the largest member of another, then the one class surpasses the other; and if one class surpasses another, then the largest member of one surpasses the largest member of the other. Thus, if the tallest man is taller than the tallest woman, then men in general are taller than women."
Now hold the phone! That ain't necessarily so! At best, if the tallest man is taller than the tallest woman the probability is perhaps higher that men are in general taller than women. But it certainly isn't an assumption that is entirely safe to make--I'd almost call it an error in logic. Maybe, somewhere in the Chernobyl area, there's an 11-foot-tall woman, a result of the radiation from the 1986 accident, who is taller than any man on the planet. Aristotle may be wrong!
Other things that Ari says just seem outdated and silly. For instance, in chapter 5, book I he says "The constituents of wealth are: plenty of coined money and territory; the ownership of numerous, large, and beautiful estates; also the ownership of numerous and beautiful implements, live stock, and slaves. [emphasis added] All these kinds of property are our own, are secure, gentlemanly, and useful." Sounds like a weird combination of J.R. Ewing, Ted Turner, and some southern plantation owner. Aristotle may be a capitalist, racist pig! And, let us not also forget this comment in Book I, chapter 9: "Again, one quality of action is nobler than another if it is that of a naturally finer being: thus a man's will be nobler than a woman's." He's a bleeping sexist, too!
"I could go on and on," as they say, with lots of other examples of this nature from Aristotle's Rhetoric. But I can't do all the work for you--go find your own silly "Aristotle-isms"! But the bigger point is this: if Aristotle can be flawed, then it's OK if my book is a little flawed--because in the end, I think his flaws are more glaring than any of mine! Whew, that's a relief.
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