Chaïm Perelman (1912–1984)

Chaïm Perelman was born to a Jewish family in Warsaw, Poland. His father was a diamond trader, and the family immigrated to Antwerp, Belgium in 1925. He studied at the Université Libre de Bruxelles, where he earned two doctorates, one in law in 1934, and the other in philosophy in 1938. That year, he was appointed a lecturer in the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters. He married historian Fela (Fajga) Estera Liwer in 1935. During World War II, the Perelmans worked with the Comité de Défense des Juifs, the Belgian Jewish resistance organization, and helped rescue Jewish children. By the end of the war, Prof. Perelman had risen to become professor of logic and metaphysics, the youngest full professor in the history of the university. He helped found the organization Aide aux Israélites Victimes de la Guerre to aid Holocaust survivors and refugees. An ardent supporter of Israel, he served on the board of governors of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. In 1948, he began working with Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca on a project that would eventually establish ancient rhetoric as the foundation for a logic of value judgments. In 1958, they published their magnum opus, Traité de l'argumentation: La nouvelle rhétorique (English translation, The New Rhetoric: A Treatise on Argumentation, 1969). In 1962, Prof. Perelman was invited to Pennsylvania State University as a distinguished visiting professor. That same year, he was awarded the Francqui Prize for Human Sciences. He was director of the National Center for Research in Logic at the Université Libre de Bruxelles. He served as president of the Société Belge de Philosophie and secretary-general of the Fédération Internationale des Sociétés de Philosophie. He published numerous articles in philosophical journals, and other books that included Justice et Raison (1963), and Rhétorique et Philosophie (1952). In recognition of his accomplishments, Prof. Perelman was appointed to the peerage as a baron by the Belgian legislature in 1983.