Retórica en Tomás de Aquino: Arte liberal y ciencia especulativa

Abstract

Mucho se ha escrito sobre el arte de la lógica en Tomás de Aquino, pero muy poco respecto de su división en gramática, retórica y dialéctica. En efecto, durante al menos las últimas cinco décadas pareciera haberse desatendido el orden de las artes liberales entre sus textos, pues se analiza, se explica y se glosa los Analytica Posteriora como el principal texto lógico de Tomás, y se aduce apresuradamente que la división medieval de la lógica como trivium no parece haber hallado en dicho fraile un debido lugar.

Thomas Aquinas is known to have engaged neither in a specific treaty to the rhetorical art nor in thinking about which is the rhetoric speculatively and carefully. His position is shown in many of his treatises in a dispersed form. And in several passages, he had the opportunity to clarify what Aristotle, Cicero, Augustine, Boethius and others said. Thus, the present article seeks to reconstruct Aquinas’ own opinion about rhetoric; since he seemed to have assumed the division of logic as trivium among the liberal arts in the introduction to his commentary on the Analytica Posteriora. Yet, in the Summa Theologiae, he mentioned it as a science, thus claiming a new way to consider this medieval tradition.