Chaïm Perelman (born Henio (or Henri) Perelman; sometimes referred to mistakenly as Charles Perelman) (20 May 1912 – 22 January 1984) was a Belgian philosopher of Polish-Jewish origin. He was among the most important argumentation theorists of the 20th century. His chief work is the Traité de l'argumentation – la nouvelle rhétorique (1958), with Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca, translated into English as The New Rhetoric: A Treatise on Argumentation, by John Wilkinson and Purcell Weaver (1969).
Life and work Perelman and his family emigrated from Warsaw to Antwerp, Belgium, in 1925. He began his undergraduate studies at the Université Libre de Bruxelles, where he would remain for the duration of his career. He earned a doctorate in law in 1934, and after completing a dissertation on the philosopher and mathematician Gottlob Frege, earned a second doctorate in 1938. In the same year, Perelman was appointed lecturer at Brussels in the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters. By the end of the war, he became the youngest full professor in the history of that university.
Perelman's friend Mieczysław Maneli wrote: "Perelman was a Belgian, a Jew, a Pole and an authentic cosmopolitan... If one prefers to call Perelman a Polish Jew, then only in the sense suggested by Czeslaw Milosz ... [he belonged to] a special category of Jewish-European intellectual, different from all the other Jewish and non-Jewish intellectuals.... Perelman was uniquely able to combine his nationality and his humanity in his writings. He was an ardent Belgian patriot and he preserved close ties with Polish scholars and Polish culture at the same time."
Perelman's initial research in law and philosophy was carried out under the aegis of logical positivism. In 1944, he completed an empiricist study of justice and concluded that since applications of the law always involve value judgments—and since values cannot be subjected to the rigors of logic—the foundations of justice must be arbitrary. Upon completing the study, Perelman considered its conclusion untenable since value judgments form an integral part of all practical reasoning and decision-making, and to claim that these judgments lack any logical basis was to deny the rational foundations of philosophy, law, politics, and ethics.
As a result of his empiricist study of justice, Perelman rejected positivism in favour of philosophies that provided a rationale for value judgments. In 1948, he met Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca, who had also attended the Université Libre de Bruxelles, and began collaborating on a project that would eventually establish ancient rhetoric as the foundation for a logic of value judgments.
In 1958, Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca published their study of informal reasoning as Traité de l'argumentation: la nouvelle rhétorique. Undertaken in the spirit of Fregean observation and synthesis, the work analyzed a wide range of actual arguments from the realms of philosophy, law, politics, ethics, and journalism. The result was a theory of argumentation that was grounded in considerations of value and audience and that outlined points of departure and general techniques for argument.
In 1962, Perelman was invited by Henry W. Johnstone and Robert Oliver to take a position at Pennsylvania State University as a distinguished visiting professor. The collaboration between Johnstone and Perelman in particular, which had begun prior to the publication of la nouvelle rhétorique, proved fruitful. Johnstone created the influential journal Philosophy and Rhetoric, and Perelman became established in the United States as a leading argumentation theorist.
Throughout the next two decades, Perelman continued publishing works related to or derived from the new rhetoric. He also made significant contributions to studies in law as director of the National Center for Research in Logic at the Université Libre de Bruxelles, and through continued publications on legal philosophy and argument. In 1973 he was one of the signers of the Humanist Manifesto II. Perelman's friend, Mieczysław Maneli, wrote about his attitude towards Judaism: "He very consciously rejects any theology or earthly or heavenly salvation, any monism of values, any absolutistic interpretations of human needs and forms of freedoms. Any form of theology is unacceptable towards him."
In recognition of his academic and civic accomplishments, Perelman was appointed to the baronage by the Belgian legislature in December 1983. In 1962 Chaïm Perelman was awarded the Francqui Prize for Human Sciences. He died at his home in Brussels from a heart attack on 22 January 1984.
Perelmanian philosophy After completing , Perelman rejected the usefulness of logical positivism beyond its applications to pure science. In published five years later, he further outlined the limits of first philosophies or metaphysics. Because these approaches relied on a series of self-evident and mutually supporting axioms, any perceived error would disable the entire philosophy and its claims to reveal universal and absolute truths. Prevalent alternatives, especially the relativism of Jean-Paul Sartre, were also untenable for Perelman since the absolutes of metaphysics were merely replaced in these approaches by absolute skepticism.
During his research with Olbrechts-Tyteca, Perelman would develop a philosophy that avoided the absolutes of both positivism and radical relativism. After encountering an excerpt of Brunetto Latini in the appendix of Jean Paulhan's , Perelman began researching ancient Greco-Latin approaches to argumentation. He found that while a specific logic of value judgments had never been established, an approach to the problem was apparent in the works of Aristotle. In the Posterior Analytics, Aristotle establishes the principles of demonstration or analytics, which rely on the accepted premises and necessary conclusions of the syllogism. In the Topics and elsewhere, Aristotle opposes the demonstrative approach to dialectics, or rhetorical reasoning, which relies on premises that are acceptable in a given situation and are thus contingent. With Aristotle's distinctions, Perelman was able to perceive the contradiction of first philosophies: while claiming to reveal universal and absolute truths according to demonstrative methods, philosophy was in reality more concerned with persuading specific audiences to accept its claims. For Perelman, then, a viable philosophy—capable of establishing aspects of being and inducing reasonable action—must be constructed according to probabilities and must be able to withstand impositions of value and other contingencies stemming from its reception by particular audiences. Perelman's approach, which he termed regressive philosophy, thus sought to incorporate socially constructed truths and to remain amenable to changes should those truths be modified.
While rhetoric and argumentation provided the core of Perelman's philosophy, his regressive approach also shaped his treatise on non-formal argumentation. In the conclusion of the new rhetoric, Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca state that in opposition to the absolutes common in philosophy, their project acknowledges that "men and groups of men adhere to opinions of all sorts with a variable intensity" and that "these beliefs are not always self-evident, and they rarely deal with clear and distinct ideas". To uncover the logic that governs these beliefs and ideas, Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca rely on a regressive philosophy that accounts for the variability of particular situations and particular values. Perelman would employ this same approach in future developments of the new rhetoric and in subsequent writings on law and justice.
The new rhetoric
Overview Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca began research on the logic of non-formal arguments in 1948. Following Frege's comprehensive approach to the study of mathematics, they collected a wide range of writing from academic, professional, religious, and popular realms to devise and apply their theory. After encountering Latini and "rediscovering" the Greco-Latin rhetorical tradition, both the project and its philosophical basis took a definitive shape. Perelman hypothesized that the rationale governing non-formal argument could be derived from the principles of rhetorical theory and from considerations of audience and values in particular. These considerations in turn affected the specific structure of arguments, including the bases of agreement and the availability of specific appeals. Perelman's analysis also produced an overview of the various techniques apparent across the diverse group of arguments collected in the course of research.
The following discussion of the new rhetoric is organized according to the three sections of the book, and covers the major concepts contained in each.
The framework of argumentation The new rhetoric is founded on the idea that "since argumentation aims at securing the adherence of those to whom it is addressed, it is, in its entirety, relative to the audience to be influenced" (1969, p. 19). Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca rely in particular for their theory of argumentation on the twin concepts of universal and particular audiences: while every argument is directed to a specific individual or group, the orator decides what information and what approaches will achieve the greatest adherence according to an ideal audience. This ideal, Perelman explains, can be embodied, for example, "in God, in all reasonable and competent men, in the man deliberating or in an elite" (2001, p. 1393). Like particular audiences, then, the universal audience is never fixed or absolute but depends on the orator, the content and goals of the argument, and the particular audience to whom the argument is addressed. These considerations determine what information constitutes "facts" and "reasonableness" and thus help to determine the universal audience that, in turn, shapes the orator's approach.
The adherence of an audience is also determined by the orator's use of values, a further key concept of the new rhetoric. Perelman's treatment of value and his view of epideictic rhetoric sets his approach apart from that of the ancients and of Aristotle in particular. Aristotle's division of rhetoric into three genres—forensic, deliberative, and epideictic—is largely motivated by the judgments required for each: forensic or legal arguments require verdicts on past action, deliberative or political rhetoric seeks judgment on future action, and epideictic or ceremonial rhetoric concerns values associated with praise or blame and seeks no specific decisions. For Aristotle, the epideictic genre was of limited importance in the civic realm since it did not concern facts or policies. Perelman, in contrast, believes not only that epideictic rhetoric warrants more attention, but that the values normally limited to that genre are in fact central to all argumentation. "Epideictic oratory", Perelman argues, "has significance and importance for argumentation because it strengthens the disposition toward action by increasing adherence to the values it lauds" (1969, p. 50). These values, moreover, are central to the persuasiveness of arguments in all rhetorical genres since the orator always attempts to "establish a sense of communion centered around particular values recognized by the audience" (1969, p. 51).
The starting points of argumentation All argumentation, according to Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca, must proceed from a point of agreement; contentious matters in particular cannot be introduced until sufficient agreement on prior or related issues has already been established. The bases of agreement are divided into two categories: the first deals with facts, truths, and presumptions; the second with values, hierarchies, and loci of the preferable.