Abstract

More than fifty years have passed since Chaïm Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca published Traité de l'argumentation: La nouvelle rhétorique, and over forty have slipped by since the work was translated into English as The New Rhetoric: A Treatise on Argumentation. The inversion of the title and subtitle in the French and English versions expresses well the chiasmic dynamic of the philosophy of rhetoric and the rhetoric of philosophy that defines the new rhetoric project. Its overall aim is essentially philosophical: "the justification of the possibility of a human community in the sphere of action when this justification cannot be grounded in a reality or an objective truth" (1969, 514). This project is ..