“An Inconvenient Truth”

“An Inconvenient Truth”Philosophy 1 Monday, March 11, 2013 “An Inconvenient Truth” It is amazing how in the modern day that such an ancient style of persuasion is used. It is refreshing to see such an old style of persuasion used in such an ever changing part of society today, politics. Over the next four years it will be interesting to see, with a new view of persuasion how politics will use the same standards as Aristotle. After watching the documentary “An Inconvenient Truth”, Al Gore’s proved by his examples and facts that he is more sophist than gadfly.

We are living in a new age of sophism but without a modern Socrates to remind the public just how silly our highly fortunate new rhetoricians can be. Science has always had its group of “gadflies” and publicity seekers who make a living trashing the hard work of their betters. The ancient Greeks called them Sophists. On “An Inconvenient Truth”, Al Gore grabs the audience attention by using ethos, pathos and logos. (Plato’s Theory) These terms provide to the author an appeal to ethics, emotions and logic to the audience that will help the reader to agree with Al Gore’s argument.

The first term to use on his speech is ethos, we tend to believe on people who we respect, and Al Gore uses ethos to create an impression to the reader or the audience that he is someone worth listening to. For example at the beginning of his speech he said, “I’m Al Gore. I used to be the next president of the United States”, by saying this, he proves to be an educated person and someone worth listening too. He also used ethics by knowing his audience and making a speech mostly on liberals, showing that he’s different than Bush.

Furthermore, Al Gore, in his documentary, “an inconvenient truth” addresses the topic of global warming and argues that global warming is a great danger, and we should take action on the issue. He supports this claim by giving statistics, using persuasion, giving anecdotes from his life that helped him become who he is now and his contribution to society, and also uses again pathos, logos and ethos on his project, by providing evidences on the issue, by showing the audience scientifically proven graphs and finally by making a call for action to all humans and convincing the audience that we need to do something about it.

Al Gore’s purpose is to inform and persuade the audience that we need to make a change on our behaviors that are making all these climate changes and catastrophes. Al Gore provides information in order to show us the real truth of the planet’s environmental dangerous changes and prevent the expansion of global warming. Al Gore uses a worried tone to address his intended audience on his conferences on the mission to stop global warming.

All the steps that Al Gore took on his documentary show the same process that all the philosophers such as Plato, Socrates, Descartes and Hobbes were explaining. By showing facts and go deeper into the subject, and it is up to you to believe it or not. All in all, “An Inconvenient Truth” focuses on an important topic that we need to start paying attention to now- global warming. Many facts are stated and shown through graphs and research. I believe that to be “impartial” and “balanced” on global warming means one must take a position like Gore’s.