Rhetoric in its historical dimension: Towards the sophistic, technical and philosophical rhetorics

ABSTRACT: This article describes the historical dimension of classical rhetoric. Like the western philosophy,classical rhetoric is devised into the ancient, medieval, modern and contemporary periods. As we know,classical rhetoric has gone through the following three stages: the sophistic rhetoric emphasizes the role of thespeaker; the technical rhetoric focuses on the importance of the speech; and the philosophical rhetoric deals withthe relevance of the audience. In this article, we give an equal importance to the three components of rhetoric,that is, the speaker, the speech and the audience.