La retórica en la antigüedad griega y china

Abstract

The history of rhetoric and argumentation theory is most usually based and centred on Greek and Latin Classical sources describing the long development of the so called “Classical Rhetoric”, a dominant tradition for more than twenty centuries in our West World. The present paper offers us a parallel study of argumentative matters (practices and theories) as based on ancient Chinese sources. It also undertakes a comparative study of both cultures that aims at revealing some significant traits in each of them. The very different contexts in which argumentation took place in the Chinese ancient courts, on the one hand, and the Greek polis, on the other, would result in also different approaches to rhetorical theory.

Keywords: Ancient rhetoric, ancient Chinese argumentation, ancient Greek argumentation, universalism, relativism, interculturalism.