Sulle ragioni di un dialogo (mancato): retorica e filosofia del linguaggio in Italia

In Italy, there is no real dialogue between rhetoric and philosophy of language. Rhetoric is a discipline practised almost only by philologists and literary scholars. One important reason for this lack of dialogue, I argue, is that in Italy there has not been a reconsideration of sophists’ rhetorical theory. Two main consequences can be derived from that reconsideration: 1) rhetoric was in its origins a philosophy of language, which didn’t consider language autonomously but in close relationship with what is out of language; 2) rhetoric did focus on the agonistic dimension of linguistic practice and therefore did think about the complex relationship between language and violence (power). I take the field of argumentation theory as a good example of what it means to give up to a rhetorical point of view about language.