The Philosophy of Argument

This chapter provides an overview of the philosophy of argument. It describes the conceptual and systematic aspects of logic, dialectic, and rhetoric, and illustrates how the insights developed within these classical disciplines are reflected in approaches within the present-day field of argumentation theory. The overview starts, in Section 31.2, with a general introduction into the philosophy of argument, elucidating its research questions and the characteristics of the main perspectives from which these questions are answered. Then, in Section 31.3, how philosophers of argument conceptualize argumentative discourse at large is discussed. The section first focuses on dialectical taxonomies of dialogue types and communicative practices in which argumentation plays a central role. Subsequently, it presents the classical rhetorical theory of genres of speech.