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easoning behind those words. Early in her investigation of
invention in Current-Traditional Rhetoric, The Methodical
Memory, Sharon Crowley alludes to Logos during a discussion of
the “topics” when she writes: “The topics […] were a set of
argumentative strategies that were available to any trained
rhetor. Since the topics represented common strategies for
acquiring knowledge, the rhetor who employed them could be
confident that an audience would immediately understand his
procedure” (3). In essence, Logos was not simply knowledge –
“knowledge as possessed in common by all members of a community”
(4) as Crowley puts it, “communal knowledge” (162) – but the
reasoning that orders that knowledge into a rational coherence.
For Plato, who himself introduced a teenaged Aristotle to
philosophical as well as rhetorical thought, Logos was not
simply human reasoning or knowledge but some almost supernal
Reason whose design was written upon the universe. As Plato’s
Socrates says to Glaucon in that Philosophy 101 favorite (and a
staple reading from the freshman writing courses I have taught
over the years), the so-called “Allegory of the Cave” from Book
VII of his The Republic, Logos is “the universal author of all
things beautiful and right, parent of light and of the lord of
light in this visible world, and the immediate source of reason
and truth in the intellectual” (208) and “the power upon which
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