Richard Whately

1787-1863 · English · Argumentation Theory, Logic, Christian Evidences, Political Economy

A presumption in favour of any supposition means, not that it is antecedently probable, but that it must stand good till some sufficient reason is adduced against it.

Richard Whately was an Oxford logician who became Archbishop of Dublin, and he did more than anyone to rescue formal logic from the contempt into which the eighteenth century had dropped it. His *Elements of Logic* (1826) argued that the syllogism is not a method of discovery — the charge that had been used to bury it — but the form to which all valid reasoning can be reduced for inspection, which is a different and defensible claim.

Topics Richard Whately addresses

• presumption
• the burden of proof
• the shifting of the burden
• argumentative composition
• invention of arguments
• conviction and persuasion
• the syllogism
• logic as the science of reasoning
• logic is not an art of discovery
• the ambiguous middle
• petitio principii
• the classification of fallacies
• the credit of testimony
• historic doubts
• the evidences of Christianity
• political economy as moral science
• perspicuity of style
• energy in style
• elocution and delivery
• the natural manner of delivery
• argument from analogy
• definition and division
• sign and cause
• the a fortiori argument

Converse with Richard Whately on Symposium. Every reply is grounded in Richard Whately's own writing and cites the page it came from. The corpus is public-domain text.