From Metaphysics to Rhetoric

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-v

   PDF

2. Foreword — The Modernity of Rhetoric

   • Michel Meyer

   Pages 1-7

3. Formal Logic and Informal Logic

   • Chaïm Perelman

   Pages 9-14

4. Logic and Argumentation

   • Jean Ladrière

   Pages 15-35

5. To Reason While Speaking

   • Jean-Blaise Grize

   Pages 37-48

6. Organization and Articulation of Verbal Exchanges: Question-Response Exchanges in Polemical Contexts

   • Pierre Oléron

   Pages 49-69

7. Argumentativity and Informativity

   • Jean-Claude Anscombre, Oswald Ducrot

   Pages 71-87

8. Saying and Knowing

   • Judith Schlanger

   Pages 89-94

9. Dialectic, Rhetoric and Critique in Aristotle

   • Lambros Couloubaritsis

   Pages 95-110

10. Toward an Anthropology of Rhetoric

    • Michel Meyer

    Pages 111-136

11. Rhetoric — Poetics — Hermeneutics

    • Paul Ricoeur

    Pages 137-149

12. Rhetoric and Literature

    • Michel Beaujour

    Pages 151-168

13. The Figure and the Argument

    • Olivier Reboul

    Pages 169-181

14. Rhetoric and Politics

    • Romain Laufer

    Pages 183-197

by the question in its being an answer, if only in a circumstantial (i. e. inessential) manner. One indeed must question oneself in order to remember, says Plato, but the dialectic, which would be scientific, must be something else even if it remains a play of question and answer. This contradiction did not escape Aristotle: he split the scientific from the dialectic and logic from argumentation whose respective theories he was led to conceive in order to clearly define their boundaries and specificities. As for Plato, he found in the famous theory of Ideas what he sought in order to justify knowledge as that which is supposed to hold its truth only from itself. What do Ideas mean within the framework of our approach? In what consists the passage from rhetoric to ontology which leads to the denaturation of argumentation? When Socrates asked, for example, "What is virtue?", he thought one could not answer such a question because the answer refers to a single proposition, a single truth, whereas the formulation of the question itself does not indicate this unicity. For any answer, another can be given and thus continuously, if necessary, until eventually one will come across an incompatibility. Now, to a question as to what X, Y, or Z is, one can answer in many ways and nothing in the question itself prohibits multiplicity. Virtue is courage, is justice, and so on.

• Argument
• Argumentation
• formal logic
• logic
• metaphysics

• University of Brussels, Belgium

  Michel Meyer

Policies and ethics