Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca


Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca was a Belgian academic and longtime co-worker of the philosopher Chaïm Perelman. She volunteered in 1948 to support his work and developed several aspects of the New Rhetoric independently in later years.

Life and work

Olbrechts-Tyteca was born into an important family of Brussels in 1899 and studied several humanities and social scientific methods at the University of Brussels without seeking a career. She married the statistician Raymond Olbrechts, eleven years older than herself, and lived an academical and social quiet life until she met Perelman in 1948.
Olbrechts-Tyteca and Perelman worked together between 1948 and 1984. During this time they worked out an influential contribution to argumentation theory. Their opus magnum Traité de l'argumentation : La nouvelle rhétorique. led – together with a book of Toulmin, published in the same year – to the end of argumentative Logicism. The concrete contribution of Olbrechts-Tyteca to this and the other joined works is disputed among scholars but prevailing opinion is that she contributed the vast illustrative part, while Perelman outlined the abstract-theoretical aspects.
The Belgian academic established herself as an independent scholar with a work on rhetoric and comics, Le Comique du Discours, in 1974.

Work