Plato's Reasons

Christopher W. Tindale is Director of the Centre for Research in Reasoning, Argumentation, and Rhetoric at the University of Windsor in Canada. He is the author of How We Argue: 30 Lessons in Persuasive Communication and The Anthropology of Argument: Cultural Foundations of Rhetoric and Reason, among other books.

"Tindale has done an admirable job of showing that Plato's ambivalent relationship with rhetoric doesn't end with middle dialogues such as the Gorgias and Phaedrus. He convincingly demonstrates that Plato not only continues to keep rhetoric in the forefront of his later dialogues, but also rehabilitates it and grants it a significant, albeit subordinate role to play." — John Harris, University of Alberta"This is a groundbreaking work that contributes in a masterful way not to just one field but several, such as Platonic philosophy, rhetoric, and theory of argumentation. Tindale also provides a link between classical philosophy and modern issues of informal logic. For the first time, the classical triad of logic, rhetoric, and dialectic central to informal logic and argumentation theory are applied to the complete oeuvre of Plato." — Manfred Kraus, University of Tübingen, Germany

• AcknowledgmentsAbbreviations and TranslationsGeneral Introduction: Inside the City of Reason Part I: The Logician Introduction to Part I: Plato and the Intricacies of Logic 1. Socratic Arguments 2. Refutation: The Logic of the Early Dialogues 3. Contentious Arguments: Preconditions for Aristotle's Theory of "Fallacy" in the Dialogues of Plato 4. Strong Arguments Part II: The Rhetorician Introduction to Part II: Plato's Style 5. Plato's Attack on Rhetoric: Fractures in the Standard Narrative 6. The Atopic Philosopher 7. Platonic Devices 8. Back in Plato's Labyrinth: The Rhetorical Challenges of the Republic9. Rhetoric in the Middle Plato and Beyond Part III: The Dialectician Introduction to Part III: A New Dialectic 10. Tracing Dialectic 11. The Song that Dialectic Sings: Methods in the Middle Dialogues 12. The Dialectician References Index