The New Rhetoric , the “Rhetoric of the Preferable,” and the Discourse on Values in Nineteenth-Century Philosophy

ABSTRACT In The New Rhetoric, Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca challenged the Cartesian understanding of the reasonable within philosophy with an expanded understanding based on types of agreements linked to types of audiences. They brought this same perspective to an analysis of values and value judgments in an attempt to respond to the logical empiricists’ critique. While scholars have examined the first of these goals, they have not attended to their analysis of values. This article addresses that neglect. It proposes that the way to understand Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca’s reevaluation of value judgment is to place The New Rhetoric in the context of the nineteenth-century discourse on values within philosophy. While rejecting the a priori ontology that characterizes most axiology, Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca nonetheless employ the concepts and technical vocabulary of the philosophers’ paradigm to transform the axiologists’ logic of values into their rhetoric of the preferable.