Chaïm Perelman

Works

• 1945On Justice

  Analyses six common conceptions of justice and finds a shared formal core: beings of the same essential category must be treated alike; which categories count, however, depends on values that logic cannot prove.

• 1958The New Rhetoric: A Treatise on Argumentation

  Written with Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca: an analysis of argument in law, politics and philosophy, where proof is impossible but reasoning is still possible – how speakers start from premises an audience accepts and win its adherence through association and dissociation of ideas.

Position

Perelman is on the map as the founder, with Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca, of the “new rhetoric”, one of the founding works of modern argumentation theory. Trained as a logician, he concluded in “On Justice” (1945) that formal logic can establish only a rule of formal justice – treat alike beings of the same essential category – while the choice of categories depends on values that cannot be proved. Rather than leave value judgements to the irrational, as logical positivism seemed to require, he and Olbrechts-Tyteca studied how people actually argue in law, politics, philosophy and everyday life. Argumentation, unlike demonstration, aims at the adherence of an audience; it starts from what the audience accepts – facts, truths, presumptions, values, hierarchies, commonplaces – and works through the association and dissociation of ideas. The “universal audience”, the speaker’s conception of all reasonable people, serves as the standard of rational argument. In legal philosophy he showed how judges justify decisions by reasonable rather than demonstrative argument. Beside Stephen Toulmin’s “The Uses of Argument” (1958), the “Traité” revived the study of rhetoric in philosophy, law and communication studies; the status of the universal audience – a standard of reason or a projection of the speaker – has been much discussed.

Life & context

Chaïm Perelman was born on 20 May 1912 in Warsaw; his family emigrated to Antwerp in 1925. He studied law and philosophy at the Free University of Brussels, taking doctorates in law (1934) and in philosophy (1938, with a thesis on Gottlob Frege). He taught logic, ethics and metaphysics at Brussels from 1938 and was professor there from 1945 to 1978. During the German occupation he and his wife Fela Perelman were active in the Jewish resistance and helped to hide Jewish children. From 1948 he worked with Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca on the study of argumentation; their “Traité de l’argumentation” appeared in 1958. He founded the Belgian National Centre for Research in Logic and was made a baron in 1983. He died in Brussels on 22 January 1984.

Further main works

• De la justice (1945)
• Rhétorique et philosophie (with L. Olbrechts-Tyteca, 1952)
• Traité de l’argumentation. La nouvelle rhétorique (with L. Olbrechts-Tyteca, 1958)
• Logique juridique. Nouvelle rhétorique (1976)
• L’empire rhétorique (1977)