Augustine’s critic of classical education from the New Rhetoric’s perspective

This paper shouldn’t be considered as a specialized study on Augustinian texts. Its ambition is much limited: to show how the New Rhetoric offers a frame which helps to supplely address the competition between argumentative configurations emerging from different socio-cultural backgrounds. Saint Augustine’s Confessions, and in particular the critique of classical education which was the author’s own education, allows us examine 4 aspects which seem intimately intertwined in the Perelman’s system: (a) the relation between epideictic and education (as both reinforce the adhesion to fundamental values in a given society), (b) the socio-historically situated character of those values and (c) the interest of considering the New Rhetoric as a philosophical project?

This paper shouldn’t be considered as a specialized study on Augustinian texts. Its ambition is much limited: to show how the New Rhetoric offers a frame which helps to supplely address the competition between argumentative configurations emerging from different socio-cultural backgrounds. Saint Augustine’s Confessions, and in particular the critique of classical education which was the author’s own education, allows us examine 4 aspects which seem intimately intertwined in the Perelman’s system: (a) the relation between epideictic and education (as both reinforce the adhesion to fundamental values in a given society), (b) the socio-historically situated character of those values and (c) the interest of considering the New Rhetoric as a philosophical project?