Abstract
held at the University of Coimbra in Portugal (October 2-4, 2008).The colloquium had two goals.One of the goals was to reflect on the impact to this day of two books that revolutionised the state of the art in argumentation in the XXth century: Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca's Traitede l'argumentation: La nouvelle rhetorique and Toumin's The Uses of Argument, both published in 1958.The other goal of the colloquium was ''to take stock of the current state of rhetoric and argumentation theory.''The present volume attests that especially the latter goal has been realized: it includes a survey of a variety of topics, and sometimes approaches, to the study of argumentation, written by some of the most prominent argumentation scholars.The editor of the volume has chosen to divide the articles into five topical parts, each centred upon a different issue.I shall briefly discuss these articles in the order in which they are published, limiting myself to those in English and French.Unfortunately, the articles published in Portuguese can only be mentioned by the present reviewer without further comment.Under the ambitious title Historical and philosophical studies on the influences of Perelman and Toulmin, two articles have been included in Part I.In the first article, J. Anthony Blair discusses The pertinence of Toulmin and Perelman/Olbrechts-Tyteca for informal logic.Blair's article traces back the history of informal logic and attempts, often with caution, to show how Toulmin's and Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca's ideas have influenced the particular theoretical interests of informal logicians.Although informal logic came into being independently of the ideas of Toulmin and Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca, Blair claims a significant influence of the 1958 books on informal logic lately.In Blair's view, three of