The EU Referendum campaigns should learn from Aristotle

Thu, 16 Jun 2016 00:00:00 +0000

An email sent to all my friends and family.

There’s no doubting Aristotle was a rare genius. Encyclopædia Britannica calls him the first genuine scientist. And it’s amazing that here I am in the 21st Century emailing you (and in fact just about everyone I know with an email address) about the insights of a man born exactly 2400 years ago.

(That’s equivalent to someone doing the same for you or me in the 44th Century CE, and I think we can agree on the likelihood of that!)

I read this article on Aristotelian rhetoric / persuasive powers in 2012 , and I was so enamoured that I wrote a short blog post on it at the time. In summary, Aristotle concluded that the three most powerful tools of persuasion are:

Ethos – argument by character
Logos – argument by logic
Pathos – appealing to the emotions.

Rhetoric on Philip Sheldrake

The EU Referendum campaigns should learn from Aristotle