Abstract
As with all sad and sudden departures, there is an unfinished path that others now must take. The work of the late Chaim Perelman was always something of a willed legacy. But as it is, the elaboration of this legacy must set aside the occasion for something the author would have well understood: a dialogue of mind, one that begins in the real, but must continue — if it is to continue at all — in the imagination. I am concerned in this essay with the domain of practical reason, and the specific contributions of Perelman’s work to its investigation. However, this essay hopes to move beyond epideictic and exposition at the same time. Specifically, I will claim that there is a rich path to be followed in the connection between the rhetorical audience, and the “rules” that Perelman would have guide practical inference. However, in the body of Perelman’s translated work, at least, that connection has been set aside, in favor of a formal (or rule-constituted) theory of audiences themselves. The theory is elegant, and has been enticing to a diminishing generation of traditional philosophy. But it has lent some force to the charge that traditionalists are wont to rationalize philosophy and philosophize rhetoric. Rather than dwell on such charges, the body of my essay will offer some substantive direction to the rules of practical reason through the use of an extended example (the Dispute over Choice vs. Right to Life).
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Notes
Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981), chs. 1-3; see also Allen Megill, Prophets of Extremity: Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault, Derrida (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), pp. 339-353.
Kenneth Seeskin, ‘Never Speculate, Never Explain: The State of Contemporary Philosophy,’ American Scholar (Winter, 1979-80), 19–33.
The reference, of course, is to Hegel, but the process has a history that predates its own deification. See Timothy J. Reiss, The Discourse of Modernism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982), pp. 9–410.
For an elaboration of this development, see Thomas B. Farrell, ‘Rhetorical Resemblance: Paradoxes of a Practical Art,’ and Robert Hariman,’ status, Marginality, and Rhetorical Theory,’ Quarterly Journal of Speech 72 (1986), in press.
Richard Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism: Essays, 1972–1980 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1982), p. 220.
The truism can be found in Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), p. 168. The mischief can be found almost everywhere.
J. Hillis Miller, “Stevens’ Rock and Criticism as Cure,” Aesthetics Today, Revised Edition, eds. Morris Philipson and Paul J. Gudel (New York: New American Library, 1980), p. 516.
MacIntyre, ch. 11.
Chaim Perelman, ‘The New Rhetoric: A Theory of Practical Reasoning,’ The Great Ideas of Today: 1970 (Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica, 1970), pp. 271–312.
Richard Whately, Elements of Rhetoric, Douglas Ehninger, ed. (Carbondale, Ill: Southern Illinois University Press, 1963).
Ch. Perelman and L. Olbrechts-Tyteca, The New Rhetoric: A Treatise on Argumentation, tr. John Wilkinson and Purcell Weaver (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1969), p. 3.
Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca, p. 9. See also Maclntyre, ch. 8.
Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca, p. 17.
Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca, p. 66.
Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca, p. 33.
Jürgen Habermas, Communication and the Evolution of Society, tr. Thomas McCarthy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1979), pp. 198–204.
Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca, p. 34.
Aristotle, Topica, tr. W. A. Pickard-Cambridge, The Basic Works of Aristotle, ed. by Richard McKeon (New York: Random House, 1941).
Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca, p. 5.
See Richard McKeon, ‘Dialectic and Political Thought and Action,’ Ethics; an International Journal of Social, Political, and Legal Philosophy LXV (1954), 1–33.
I have attempted my own less-than-definitive characterization of this “knowledge” in Farrell, ‘Knowledge, Consensus, and Rhetorical Theory,’ Quarterly Journal of Speech 62 (1976), 1–14.
Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue, second edition, pp. 152–153.
Ch. Perelman, The Idea of Justice and the Problem of Argument, tr. John Petrie (New York: The Humanities Press, 1963), p. 6.
Ch. Perelman, The Idea of Justice …, pp. 11–59.
Ch. Perelman, The Idea of Justice …, p. 28.
Edwin Black, Rhetorical Criticism: A Study in Method (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1978), pp. 95–110.
Ch. Perelman, The Idea of Justice …, p. 38.
Ch. Perelman, The Idea of Justice …, p. 40.
Ch. Perelman, The Idea of Justice …, p. 40.
Ch. Perelman, The Idea of Justice …, p. 40.
Ch. Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca, ‘Act and Person in Argument,’ The Idea of Justice…, pp. 168–195.
Ch. Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca, ‘Act and Person …,’ pp. 194–195.
I would not want to give the impression that this inference-structure emerges, fully developed, from Perelman’s pages. The form has much in common with the practical syllogism, with Ronald Beiner’s recent discussion of deliberative judgement in rhetoric; Beiner, Political Judgment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), pp. 83–102, and even with some recent developments in analytic philosophy; cf. D. S. Clarke, Jr., Practical Inferences (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985), p. 70-82.
Ch. Perelman, The Realm of Rhetoric (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1982), p. 67.
Perelman, The Realm …, p. 68.
Perelman, The Realm …, pp. 81–85.
Perelman, The Realm …, pp. 126–135.
Aeschylus, Agamemnon, The Oresteian Trilogy, tr. Philip Vellacott (Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1956), p. 47.
MacIntyre, After Virtue (2nd edition), pp. 6–7.
For political background on the controversy, see Wayne Barrett, ‘Holier Than Thou: The Backroom Politics of Archbishop O’Connor,’ Village Voice XXIX (1984), pp. 11–24; also Charles Krauthammer, ‘The Church-State Debate: The Governor and the Bishops Appeal to Heaven,’ The New Republic, Sept. 1 7 & 24, 1984, pp. 15-18.
Krauthammer, ‘The Church-State Debate …,’ p. 15.
See Fred Barnes, ‘Who is Mario Cuomo?’ The New Republic, April 8, 1985, p. 19.
John F. Kennedy, ‘Religion in Government,’ Dolphin Book of Speeches, ed. by George W. Hibbit (Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Company, 1965), pp. 178–182. The motivation for this speech is discussed by James David Barber in The Pulse of Politics: Electing Presidents in the Media Age (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1980), pp. 71-72.
I am using the text of Cuomo’s address, as it was printed in The New York Review of Books, October 25, 1984, pp. 31–37. The text has been checked against a recording of the speech. Further references will cite Cuomo, and the New York Review page number.
Cuomo, p. 31.
Cuomo, pp. 31-32.
Cuomo, p. 32.
Cuomo, p. 33.
Cuomo, pp. 33-34.
Cuomo, p. 34.
Cuomo, p. 34.
Cuomo, p. 34.
Cuomo, p. 34.
Cuomo, p. 35.
Cuomo, p. 35.
Cuomo, p. 35.
Lloyd F. Bitzer, ‘The Rhetorical Situation,’ Philosophy and Rhetoric 1 (1968), 1–13.
Kennedy, ‘Religion and Government,’ p. 182.
William M. A. Grimaldi, S. J., ‘Rhetoric and Truth: A Note on Aristotle’s Rhetoric 1355a 21-24,’ Philosophy and Rhetoric 11 (1978), 176.
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Farrell, T.B. (1986). Reason and Rhetorical Practice: The Inventional Agenda of Chaim Perelman. In: Golden, J.L., Pilotta, J.J. (eds) Practical Reasoning in Human Affairs. Synthese Library, vol 183. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-4674-3_14
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