Imagine the following situation: an act of violent assault has been committed. And there are only two possible suspects, of which one is a small and weak man and the other a big and strong man. The weak man will plead that he is not strong enough and therefore not likely to have committed the crime, which seems reasonable straight away. But there will also be a loophole for the strong man, as Aristotle tells us, who reports exactly that story (...) in book 2, chapter 24, of his Rhetoric. And he also has a name to assign to the inventor of that kind of argument (1402a17–20):The Art of Corax is composed of this topic. For if a man is not likely to be guilty of what he is accused of, for instance if, being weak, he is .. (shrink)

In 1958, Chaïm Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca published Traité de l'argumentation: La nouvelle rhétorique, the culmination of many years study. A seminal work in philosophy and rhetoric, it aimed to bring classical Aristotelian rhetoric into the modern era and present a model of argumentation that promoted action and reasonableness. One distinctive feature of the dense account found in this work is the claim that the success of argumentation can in part be measured by the responses of the audience for which (...) it is intended. By that standard, the project of the new rhetoric appears unsuccessful, because the audience for whom Perelman (and Olbrechts-Tyteca) expressly wrote was the audience least captivated by .. (shrink)