Revisiting Aristotle’s Topoi

In this paper, I investígate a question in the Rhetoric (and Topics) surrounding the metaphorical sense of Aristotle’s topos: one can look to a location for “available means of persuasion,” evoking an image of seeing (which connects with work on the spectacle in Greek philosophy); or topoi are viewed as “general lines of argument.” Are they places we go for arguments, or actual lines of arguments? The difference matters, given a propensity to view topoi as forerunners of argument schemes