Chaim Perelman
| Chaïm Perelman | |
|---|---|
Chaïm Perelman
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| Born |
20 May 1912 Warsaw, Poland |
| Died | 22 January 1984 (aged 71) Brussels, Belgium |
| Nationality | Belgian, Polish |
| Notable work | Traité de l'argumentation – la nouvelle rhétorique (1958), with Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca |
Chaïm Perelman (20 May 1912, Warsaw – 22 January 1984, Brussels) was a Polish-born philosopher of law, who studied, taught, and lived most of his life in Brussels. He was among the most important argumentation theorists of the twentieth 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 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 regressive 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.
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