Poetics and Rhetoric together with Ethics and Politics constitute the pillars of Aristotle’s Practical Philosophy.

Poetics is earliest known work that develops a theory of drama and literary forms.  His term poetics encompasses lyric and epic poetry as well as drama in its forms of comedy, tragedy and the satyr play.  All are imitations of life but differ in three ways: differences in music rhythm, meter, harmony and melody; differences in the goodness of the characters; and differences in how the narrative is presented, either acted out or told. The work was lost for centuries and found its way back to the Western world though a Latin translation of an Arabic version written by Averroes. It has been part of a classical education in the Western tradition and has been subject to an ongoing diversity of opinions.

Rhetoric is the first known attempt to develop a system of techniques in the art of persuasion and is still considered “the most important work on persuasion ever written”.  It was not written for publication, but is rather a collection of his students’ notes from his many lectures. It shows the progression of his thought from his decades at Plato’s Academy through his later work at his Lyceum.  During this time the subject evolved from being seen as a potentially dangerous and immoral tool of manipulation of emotion and omission of facts to one of the three elements of philosophy alongside logic and dialectic.

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