Chaïm Perelman

Chaïm Perelman (born Henio (or Henri) Perelman; sometimes referred to mistakenly as Charles Perelman) (20 May 1912, Warsaw – 22 January 1984, Brussels) was a Belgian philosopher of Polish-Jewish origin. He was among the most important argumentation theorists of the twentieth century. His chief work is the Traité de l'argumentation – la nouvelle rhétorique (1958), with Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca, translated into English as The New Rhetoric: A Treatise on Argumentation, by John Wilkinson and Purcell Weaver (1969). Perelman and his family emigrated from Warsaw to Antwerp, Belgium in 1925. He began his undergraduate studies at the Université Libre de Bruxelles, where he would remain for the duration of his career. He earned a doctorate in law in 1934, and after completing a dissertation on the philosopher and mathematician Gottlob Frege, earned a second doctorate in 1938. In the same year, Perelman was appointed lecturer at Brussels in the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters. By the end of the war, he became the youngest full professor in the history of that university. Perelman's friend Mieczysław Maneli wrote: "Perelman was a Belgian, a Jew, a Pole and an authentic cosmopolitan...If one prefers to call Perelman a Polish Jew, then only in the sense suggested by Czeslaw Milosz...[he belonged to] a special category of Jewish-European intellectual, different from all the other Jewish and non-Jewish intellectuals...Perelman was uniquely able to combine his nationality and his humanity in his writings. He was an ardent Belgian patriot and he preserved close ties with Polish scholars and Polish culture at the same time". Perelman's initial research in law and philosophy was carried out under the aegis of logical positivism. In 1944, he completed an empiricist study of justice and concluded that since applications of the law always involve value judgments – and since values cannot be subjected to the rigors of logic – the foundations of justice must be arbitrary.