Logos | EPFL Graph Search

Are you an EPFL student looking for a semester project?

Work with us on data science and visualisation projects, and deploy your project as an app on top of GraphSearch.

Logos (UKˈloʊɡɒs,_ˈlɒɡɒs, USˈloʊɡoʊs; lógos) is a term used in Western philosophy, psychology and rhetoric; it connotes an appeal to rational discourse that relies on inductive and deductive reasoning. Aristotle first systemised the usage of the word, making it one of the three principles of rhetoric. This specific use identifies the word closely to the structure and content of text itself. This specific usage has then been developed through the history of western philosophy and rhetoric. The word has also been used in different senses along with rhema. Both Plato and Aristotle used the term logos along with rhema to refer to sentences and propositions. It is primarily in this sense the term is also found in religion. lógos is related to légō which is cognate with Legus. The word derives from a Proto-Indo-European root, *leǵ-, which can have the meanings "I put in order, arrange, gather, choose, count, reckon, discern, say, speak". In modern usage, it typically connotes the verbs "account", "measure", "reason" or "discourse".. It is occasionally used in other contexts, such as for "ratio" in mathematics. The Purdue Online Writing Lab clarifies that logos is the appeal to reason that relies on logic or reason, inductive and deductive reasoning. In the context of Aristotle's Rhetoric, logos is one of the three principles of rhetoric and in that specific use it more closely refers to the structure and content of the text itself. Logos became a technical term in Western philosophy beginning with Heraclitus ( 535- 475 BC), who used the term for a principle of order and knowledge. Ancient Greek philosophers used the term in different ways. The sophists used the term to mean discourse. Aristotle applied the term to refer to "reasoned discourse" or "the argument" in the field of rhetoric, and considered it one of the three modes of persuasion alongside ethos and pathos. Pyrrhonist philosophers used the term to refer to dogmatic accounts of non-evident matters.

About this result

This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.

Related concepts (134)

Related lectures (2)

Philosophy

Philosophy (love of wisdom in ancient Greek) is a systematic study of general and fundamental questions concerning topics like existence, reason, knowledge, values, mind, and language. It is a rational and critical inquiry that reflects on its own methods and assumptions. Historically, many of the individual sciences, like physics and psychology, formed part of philosophy. But they are considered separate academic disciplines in the modern sense of the term.

Logos

Neoplatonism

Neoplatonism is a version of Platonic philosophy that emerged in the 3rd century AD against the background of Hellenistic philosophy and religion. The term does not encapsulate a set of ideas as much as a series of thinkers. Among the common ideas it maintains is monism, the doctrine that all of reality can be derived from a single principle, "the One". Neoplatonism began with Ammonius Saccas and his student Plotinus (c. 204/5–271 AD) and stretched to the 6th century AD.

Information Measures: Entropy and Information Theory COM-406: Foundations of Data Science

Explains how entropy measures uncertainty in a system based on possible outcomes.

Natural Language Generation: Evaluation CS-552: Modern natural language processing

Explores the evaluation of natural language generation models, emphasizing the importance of human judgments and the limitations of content overlap metrics.