From Metaphysics to Rhetoric

  • Michel Meyer

Part of the Synthese Library book series (SYLI, volume 202)

Table of contents

  1. Front Matter
    Pages i-v
  2. Chaïm Perelman
    Pages 9-14
  3. Jean Ladrière
    Pages 15-35
  4. Jean-Blaise Grize
    Pages 37-48
  5. Jean-Claude Anscombre, Oswald Ducrot
    Pages 71-87
  6. Judith Schlanger
    Pages 89-94
  7. Lambros Couloubaritsis
    Pages 95-110
  8. Michel Meyer
    Pages 111-136
  9. Paul Ricoeur
    Pages 137-149
  10. Michel Beaujour
    Pages 151-168
  11. Olivier Reboul
    Pages 169-181
  12. Romain Laufer
    Pages 183-197

About this book


by the question in its being an answer, if only in a circumstantial (i. e. inessential) manner. One indeed must question oneself in order to remember, says Plato, but the dialectic, which would be scientific, must be something else even if it remains a play of question and answer. This contradiction did not escape Aristotle: he split the scientific from the dialectic and logic from argumentation whose respective theories he was led to conceive in order to clearly define their boundaries and specificities. As for Plato, he found in the famous theory of Ideas what he sought in order to justify knowledge as that which is supposed to hold its truth only from itself. What do Ideas mean within the framework of our approach? In what consists the passage from rhetoric to ontology which leads to the denaturation of argumentation? When Socrates asked, for example, "What is virtue?", he thought one could not answer such a question because the answer refers to a single proposition, a single truth, whereas the formulation of the question itself does not indicate this unicity. For any answer, another can be given and thus continuously, if necessary, until eventually one will come across an incompatibility. Now, to a question as to what X, Y, or Z is, one can answer in many ways and nothing in the question itself prohibits multiplicity. Virtue is courage, is justice, and so on.


Argument Argumentation formal logic logic metaphysics

Editors and affiliations

  • Michel Meyer
    • 1
  1. 1.University of BrusselsBelgium

Bibliographic information

  • DOI
  • Copyright Information Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 1989
  • Publisher Name Springer, Dordrecht
  • eBook Packages Springer Book Archive
  • Print ISBN 978-94-010-7672-2
  • Online ISBN 978-94-009-2593-9
  • Buy this book on publisher's site