Chaïm Perelman

A Belgian philosopher of Polish-Jewish descent who revived the study of rhetoric as a serious philosophical discipline after it had been largely dismissed since the Enlightenment. His major work, The New Rhetoric, written with Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca, argued that reasoned argument in law, ethics, and public life relies on persuasion of an audience rather than formal logical proof alone — a claim that reshaped argumentation theory across law and philosophy departments in the twentieth century.