What Is Rhetoric?

This book offers a new unified approach to rhetoric, a means of persuading or influencing interlocutors. All the principal authors from Plato and Aristotle to contemporary theorists are integrated into Michel Meyer's 'problematological' conception of rhetoric, based on the primacy of questioning and answering in language and thought.

Michel Meyer is Perelman Professor of Rhetoric and Argumentation at the Université Libre de Bruxelles, having previously taught at Berkeley, McGill University, the Sorbonne, and the Collège de France. He is the chief editor of the Revue Internationale de Philosophie and editor of the book series L'Interrogation Philosophique at the Presses Universitaires de France. His publications in English include Of Problematology (University of Chicago Press, 1995), and Philosophy and the Passions (Penn State University Press, 1999). He is the co-editor, with Jas Elner, of Art and Rhetoric in Roman Culture (CUP, 2014). He is the founder of a philosophy called problematology, based on the priority of questioning in thought. The main works of this radical new foundation of thought have been translated into a dozen languages.