Abstract
Abstract: This article analyses the way Aristotle constructs the category of "everybody" in relation with himself and his treatise's audience. In the Aristotelian corpus, the noun anthrōpoi ("humans") is chosen when men as a species are contrasted with gods or animals, while the substantivized adjective pantes ("all"), as a universal quantifier, is used in contrast with smaller social subdivisions (e.g., "the majority," "the wise," etc.) and refers to "all men" in a distributive, rather than a collective, sense. Moreover, pantes may often be the subject of a first-person plural verb, thus explicitly including the observers—Aristotle and his readers/listeners—into the object of the observation. "Gnomic" anthrōpoi presents observations about humans as established truths from an external perspective whereas the "social" and hic et nunc character of pantes is at home both in demonstrative arguments and in the discussion of rhetorical tasks in the context of the Athenian democracy.
- Journal
- Rhetorica
- Published
- 2025-01-01
- DOI
- 10.1353/rht.2025.a965118
- CompPile
- Open Access
- Closed
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