Rhetorical Leadership

During the Second World War, Chaim Perelman, a leader in the Jewish Belgian Resistance was writing a philosophical treatise on justice. Frustrated, he discovered that his training in analytic philosophy renedered him unable to make any arguments about why his cause was more just than that of the Nazis, because he had been trained to disregard arguments about values, preferences, or the probable. So Perelman began identifying everyday arguments humans use in newspapers and politics to discover how they work and what foundations they build upon, leading to his and Lucie Albrechts-Tyteca's masterpiece The New Rhetoric. Dr. Richard Enos joins us to discuss Perelman's theory of argumentation and how it provides a basis for making rational arguments and decisions about values.