Search

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).