Introduction to Special Issue: Select Papers from the Commemoration of the 50Th Anniversary of Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca's the New Rhetoric

Abstract

Chaim Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca published Traite de l'argumentation: la nouvelle rhetorique in 1958, a work that has since come to represent the revival of rhetoric, helping to prompt the rhetorical turn in twentieth-century thought. The influence of their work is seen in a host of disciplines, including rhetoric, philosophy, jurisprudence, communication studies, critical theory, argumentation and informal reasoning. To commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the appearance of the Perelman Olbrechts-Tyteca magnus opus, John Gage, Jim Crosswhite and I collaborated to host international conference at the University of Oregon on May 17-20, 2008. Featured speakers at the conference included Jeanne Fahnestock, University of Maryland; Alan G. Gross, University of Minnesota; Michael C. Left, University of Memphis; Perelman's daughter Noemi Mattis Perelman; Francis J. Mootz III, Dickinson School of Law, Pennsylvania State University; Christopher W. Tindale, University of Windsor; and Barbara Warnick, University of Pittsburgh. Over 100 papers were presented at the conference on a variety of topics, including: argumentation, informal reasoning, legal argument and justice, rhetoric and human rights, and ethical rhetoric and communication. Dale Hample has generously offered me the opportunity to select from among the conference papers those the readers of Argumentation and Advocacy would find informative on issues related to argumentation theory and practice. The four essays in this special volume represent significant thinking about the new rhetoric, and the high quality of scholarship we witnessed at the conference. Three of the four essays are based on original archival research, and the author of the fourth provides his experience teaching Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca's argument theory with a distinguished philosopher and the responses of his students. Jim Crosswhite, author of the lead article, is one the best readers of Perelman and is well known for his Rhetoric of Reason (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996), which the Modern Language Association awarded the Mina P. Shaughnessy Prize. His essay in this special issue extends his thinking about the new rhetoric. For scholars and teachers of argument, his essay will be a significant contribution. He highlights the limitations of argument modeling, and illustrates the need for argument theory to better develop the sources of argument invention. He juxtaposes the Toulmin model with Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca's theory of argumentation. While the former is static, decidedly unrhetorical, the latter, Crosswhite maintains, is less a model and more a philosophical effort to set the boundaries of argument and the sources of argument invention. Enacting Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca's agenda, Crosswhite reflects on his concrete experience teaching a Perelmanian perspective of argumentation in collaboration with philosopher Mark Johnson, co-author of Metaphors We Live By, and student evaluations of his efforts to use the new rhetoric in the classroom. Perelman was a Jew, a biographical and cultural fact influencing the new rhetoric. Andreea Deciu Ritivoi and Janice W. Fernheimer consider both argument theory in the new rhetoric and the contested nature of twentieth-century Judaism in their essays. Ritivoi is the author of the well-reviewed Paul Ricoeur: Tradition and Innovation in Rhetorical Theory (State University of New York Press, Albany, New York, 2006). She provides a new interpretation of what Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca believed was their most innovative contribution to philosophical thinking, the notion of dissociation. She considers dissociation in both its pluralistic and dichotomous expressions. The framing of the post-World War II Romanian Diaspora and the Aron-DeGaulle confrontation, in this essay, is a contribution to our field's thinking about dissociation, bolstered with research conducted in the Hoover archive and a sophisticated close reading of the arguments advanced in the Aron-DeGaulle exchange. …