For Aristotle, arousing the passions of others can amount to giving them proper grounds for conviction. On that basis a skill in doing so can be something valuable, an appropriate constituent of the kind of expertise in rhetoric that deserves to be cultivated and given expression in a well-organised state. Such are Jamie Dow's principal claims in Passions and Persuasion in Aristotle's Rhetoric. He attributes to Aristotle a normative view of rhetoric and its role in the state, and ascribes to him a particular view of the kinds of cognitions involved in the passions.
In the first sustained...