This book identifies 25 argumentation schemes for presumptive reasoning and matches a set of critical questions to each.

The starting-point of Plutarch's dialogue de communibus notitiis is a claim made by the Stoics that Providence sent Chrysippus to remove the confusion surrounding the ideas of ννοια and πρληψισ before the subtleties of Carneades were brought into play. Unfortunately our surviving information on the subject is so much less full than could be desired that it has again returned to an obscurity from which there are only two really detailed modern attempts to remove it. The one, by L. Stein (...) , is most unsatisfactory; the other, by A. Bonhöffer , though of the greatest value in many ways, is vitiated by the fact that it constructs a system from the use of the words by Epictetus and then attempts to attach this system to the old Stoa in the face of the evidence of the doxographers, which is emended or violently interpreted to suit Epictetus. Even if Epictetus were in general a good authority for the technicalities of Chrysippus—and in the opinion of H. von Arnim he is not— this would not be a sound method of procedure. The only safe way is to take first the statements which can be attached to the Old Stoa, and having obtained our results from these, to see whether Epictetus does in fact agree. (shrink)

This book offers a reconstruction of the early Stoic doctrine of prolepsis, revealing it to be much closer to Platonic recollection in certain respects than ...

The most important contemporary development in rhetoric for the theory of argumentation is Jeanne Fahnestock's program of figural logic, the ruling insight of which is that figures epitomize arguments. Working primarily with the antimetabolic formula at the heart of Gregor Mendel's paper “Experiments in Plant Hybridization,” I investigate the figural bases of the logic anchoring this foundational essay in genetics. In addition to antimetabole, the formula also depends crucially on ploche, polyptoton, onomatopoeia, antithesis, synecdoche, reification, and metaphor.

Pragmatics and dialectics are two disciplines which have been amongst the first and most important partners for argument studies in the exploration of the complex realm of communication. Treating argumentation as a construct consisting of premises and conclusion allows for investigating some interesting properties of the phenomenon of reasoning, but does not capture a variety of aspects related to the usage of natural language and dialogical context in which real-life argumentation is typically embedded. This special issue explores some of the (...) fascinating research questions which emerge when we move beyond logic into the territory of the pragmatics and dialectics of argument. (shrink)