Who Wrote the Rhetoric? A Response to Brad McAdon

In several recent essays, Brad McAdon has argued that Aristotle's Rhetoric is such a fractured, inconsistent text that it is reasonable to conclude it is not the work of a single author, “Aristotle,” but the work of an editor who combined sections of treatises by several authors. This article challenges McAdon's thesis by reexamining the historical transmission of the Rhetoric and analyzing a central passage in the work—namely Rhetoric 1.4–14 (on the idia or special topics)—that McAdon believes Aristotle could not have written.