Chaïm Perelman

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).

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."