Philosophy & ThoughtGreek → English
Enthymeme
/ˈɛnθɪmiːm/noun
An argument with one premise left unstated, which the audience supplies for itself.
The Greek roots
ἐν
en
in, within
θυμός
thumós
spirit, heart, mind
Literally: “a thing held in the mind”
The story of the word
Aristotle calls the enthymeme the body of persuasion in the Rhetoric, and the name is exact: the missing premise stays inside the listener, who completes the argument and is therefore half-persuaded by his own reasoning. Say that a man is a politician and so cannot be trusted, and the audience quietly supplies the rest. θυμός is the seat of anger and appetite in Homer, the part of a man that shouts back at him, and it survives in the psychiatric terms dysthymia and euthymia.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → Latin → English
- First recorded
- 16th century
Same family
dysthymiaeuthymiathymos
In a sentence
Most advertising works by enthymeme, because the claim it never states is the one you cannot argue with.