Overview

The Topics constitutes Aristotle's treatise on the art of dialectic-the invention and discovery of arguments in which the propositions rest upon commonly held opinions or endoxa are places from which such arguments can be discovered or invented. In his treatise on the Topics, Aristotle does not explicitly define a topos, though it is at least primarily a strategy for argument not infrequently justified or explained by a principle. He characterises it in the Rhetoricthus: I call the same thing element and topos; for an element or a topos is a heading under which many enthymemes fall. By element, he means a general form under which enthymemes of the same type can be included. Thus, the topos is a general argument source, from which the individual arguments are instances, and is a sort of template from which many individual arguments can be constructed. The word topos, literally place, location is also related to the ancient memory method of loci , by which things to be remembered are recollected by mentally connecting them with successive real or imagined places.

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