At the end of the thirteenth century, Aristotle’s Rhetoric finally began to make some impact in the West.92 Despite Aristotle’s authority by that time, it never became a widely studied work. The first Latin commentary on it explains that the difference between belief (caused by rhetoric) and opinion (caused by dialectic) is not that opinion is accepted more firmly but rather that rhetoric moves the mind to assent by appetite (that is, appeals to emotion), while in dialectic the intellect is moved by its proper object (that is, what is reasonable).93 Some translations were made also of Arabic
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