This appreciation outlines the life and work of Giulio Preti, a philosopher of the critical rationalist movement. His was a tormented and conflictual philosophical itinerary from his intellectual roots in 1930s Italy, via the philosophical journal Studi filosofici in the 1940s, to his major works Praxis and Empiricism and Rhetoric and Logic in the 1950s and 1960s. His anxiety about the ambiguity of contemporary reality, it is suggested, is also ours.

The author argues that the persuasive process is articulated within a dynamic linking beliefs and emotions. The different possible states of equilibrium balancing these two aspects define a persuasive process as more inherently rational or more inherently rhetorical. This latter, being marked by an immediate emotional participation, functions within a social context of the community type. It is dominated by an aesthetic form of communication, where epistemic belief proceeds out of a conformist adherence to the ethos of the group. Its (...) extreme form is represented by the discourse of propaganda. Linked to the epistemic structure of the rhetorical discourse there corresponds a moral structure of resentment and an authoritarian social structure. Although rational elements and emotional elements still coexist within concrete discourses, the possibility of distinguishing them in terms of autonomous functionalities represents the specific adjunct brought by philosophical reflection to the determination of the epistemic structure of persuasion. (shrink)

Cet article présente les traits essentiels de la pensée de Giulio Preti. Il se focalise sur le primat de l’expérience pragmatique pour historiser les principes formels du savoir. L’historicité des a priori acquiert chez Preti la forme d’une historicité du sens commun, conçu comme vecteur historique des structures conceptuelles qui forment la culture. L’intégration des classiques du pragmatisme aux philosophies critiques et transcendantales européennes engendre un tournant pragmatique de la philosophie d’une grande actualité théorique.