The study of argumentation has undergone periods of decadence alternate with periods of renaissance. Currently, we are witnessing one of the latter, as proved by research flowering in many issues and aspects, both in Philosophy and in Artificial Intelligence. The work presented in this talk is concerned in particular with ``rhetorical argumentation'', which on the other hand has enjoyed consideration to a somewhat lesser extent. By rhetorical arguments we denote arguments which are both heavily based on the audience's perception of the world, and concerned more with evaluative judgments than with establishing the truth or otherwise of a proposition.

Rather than a logic focus on argumentative reasoning, or a pure computational linguistic focus on modelling discourse which happens to be argumentative, we place ourselves halfway and specifically focus on the characterisation of rhetorical argumentative discourse. Methodologically, we do this by explicitly drawing upon the philosophy of argument. We present a framework for the formalisation of rhetorical argumentation inspired by a well established philosophical theory, the New Rhetoric. We consider Health Promotion as an application domain for this theory, and we introduce PIPS (Personalised Information Platform for Life and Health Services), a newly funded European Integrated Project in the e-Health domain.