L’animale insaturo: antropologia filosofica e retorica

Abstract

In the macro-area of philosophical anthropology and philosophy of language we can find an important relationship between philosophical anthropology and rhetoric.

Starting from the analysis of Blumenberg’s essay An Anthropological Approach to the Contemporary Significance of Rhetoric, the paper will focus on the relation between rhetoric and evidence, on the status of shared assumptions that form the basis of argumentation and on the role of pistis in human nature. I will also try to propose a new concept of poor humanity: man is that animal whose poverty is tied to the biological need to believe in the inherited background that we have because we belong to a community which is bound together by science and education.

I will discuss Blumenberg’s ideas in the light of contemporary argumentation theories that consider rhetoric in the anthropological key and I will also use Wittgenstein’s On Certainty as a contemporary rhetorical text.

I will consider, according to the New Rhetoric, that self-evidence is not a specific element of argumentation. The argumentation background is not a group of necessary truths but, as Wittgenstein says, it is a system that is the element in which arguments have their own life. Furthermore I will try to show that it is not a single axiom that strikes me as obvious, but a system in which consequences and premises give each other mutual support. In conclusion, I will try to explain that learning is based on what is transmitted by the members of a community.