Pourquoi revenir à Cicéron encore une fois? Peut-êt re, à la vérité, pour comprendre, à travers lui, ce qui manque à notre temps pour qu’une grande rhétorique montre la voie comme chez les Anciens et pour tirer de ce rapprochement un moment d’interpellation. De nos jours, c’est le déclin de l’idée d’excellence dans l’espace public, de responsabilité dans l’exercice de la liberté et d’une universalité dans la parole publique qui rend le retour à Cicéron utile, sinon nécessaire. Une relecture des oratorii libri permet de faire surgir un tableau contrasté dans lequel apparaissent les enjeux de la grande sophistique de l’heure. Invasion des signes et rétrécissement du sens, prolifération de l’éthique et eclipse de la morale, bref la rhétorique, pourtant omniprésente (cf. la publicité), ne transporte plus rien au-delà d’elle-même. Le présent essai montre que, de cette impasse, Cicéron en fut conscient: la forme même des dialogues du De oratore en porte le témoignage en révélant la rhétorique comme l’antinomie du bavardage, dans la mesure où la véritable éloquence porte toujours, en dernière analyse, sur une recherche du consensus universorum.

1. Rousseau versus Hobbes’ System regarding the opposition between ‘State of Nature’ and ‘Civil State’. 2. War as a consequence of the ‘Civil State’, as well as, according to Rousseau, a kind of conflict between States. 3. War and Despotism in Rousseau’s Thought. 4. The rousseaunian distinction between “Guerre” and “État de Guerre”. 5. The War’s inevitability in a sovereign entities’ context, from the different points of view both of Rousseau and of Hegel. 6. The kantian rational Imperative of Peace 7. The Perpetual Peace as a progressive historical achievement. 8. Republican State, Citizenship and Peace according to Kant. 9. The defensive Federalism from the “Zum ewigen Frieden” and a Universal Association of States as hopeful prospects for Peace. 10. The Cosmopolitan Law. 11. The Hegelian view of War as a rational procedure to settle critical conflicts between States. 12. War as civic virtue training, according to Hegel, as well as to Kant. 13. The military “professionalism of courage” and the constraints of rational Wars conduct, according to Hegel. 14. The advanced military technology as a factor to make the War irrational. 15. Kant’s coming back.

The aim of this article is to characterize the John Rawls’s theory of justice as fairness developed in A Theory of Justice (1971), Political Liberalism (1993), Replay to Habermas (1995) and Justice as Fairness: A Restatement (2001), with a view to identifying the convergent points between deontological conception with teleological characteristics and identify a substantive conception of justice, not purely procedural, which is universalist albeit not transcendental, making possible an approach between communitarian and liberal ethical theories.

Everybody must have heard the Andersen’s tale The Emperor’s new clothes. It tells about a vain Emperor who would get new and more elegant clothes made all the time. One day, two adept impostors visited the Emperor, declared themselves accomplished weavers and offered to craft a new suit for His Majesty with a textiles with the magical property of being invisible to those not at the height of their own charge or else unforgivably stupid. The weavers received the assignment and wove throughout the days before the parade that was organized to display the new garment. They pretended to weave on an empty loom and worked with such an ability that none of the Emperor’s civil employees, who were asked to supervise the job of the weavers, had the courage to admit that they could not see anything at all. Meanwhile, the news about the special properties of the burlap spread throughout the Empire. On the parade day, the Emperor wore his new invisible dress and exited the parade. There was not a soul who did not praise the beauty of the new dress. Everyone but a child who, unaware of the deceit, said: “the King is naked!” The trick was revealed but, despite that, the Emperor stood up forthrightly dissimulating the shame. Is this not a perfect example of how ideology works, that is, of how the socio-symbolic web is not at all based on facts but rather on predetermined symbolic fictions? The purpose of this essay is to analyse ideological mechanisms in relation to subjective fantasy. Andersen’s tale, presents in parodist form both the fact that, through the working of symbolic adjustments, we always have a pre-understanding of reality, and the fact that such reality has an intrinsically perverse and cynical core. In fact, even when the deceit is revealed, we keep acting as if this order were already effective.

First, there will be as close and detailed an analysis as possible of the first two chapters of the second book of Posterior Analytics, which constitute the canonical place of the controversy, in Order to determine the meaning that should be restored there to the clause εἰ ἔστιν. After this, we will try to corroborate the conclusion we arrive at concerning the clause mentioned above by applying it to the subsequent passages of the same book where this question is raised again, either implicitly or explicitly. Finally, an examination will be made of the rest of the passages of the Aristotelian corpus, where the critic has found the occurrence of the alleged “hypothesis of existence”, chiefly in the second book of the Prior Analytics, in order to verify if such passages also offer the possibility of a reading consistent with that offered by the first two chapters initially studied. The conclusion will be that no traces of existential concern are found in any of the places searched, nor in general, in any of the connected texts within the Aristotelian corpus, and that the reading of the clause εἰ ἔστιν and of the corresponding scientific hypotheses from an existential angle are the result of a modern contamination whose origin will be diagnosed.

The heir to epic poetry and inseperable from it, Greek tragedy emerged at the same moment in history as the consolidation of the polis, revealing a tremendous unease, a crisis, at the root of which is the architecture of a new understanding of reality, the affirmation of a new logos. A different crisis accompanied the appearance of Contemporary tragedy, a crisis heralded by the announcement that “God is dead”, exemplified in the work of Nietzsche. In contrast to Greek tragedy, Contemporary tragedy asserts not the crisis of the affirmation of reason, but a denunciation of reason’s strategies and devices. Anchored in the rejection of all Absolutes, Contemporary tragedy depicts a world without feeling, of desperate solitude, of absurdity. Waiting for Godot, in the way in which it destroys language and hope, is an excellent example of Contemporary tragedy. Yet, inside this tragic voice, that announces death and nothingness, there is a resistant light that refuses to die that points to Goodness, Truth and Beauty.

L’article propose une lecture anthropologique du sentiment de la nature chez Kant, Feuerbach et Simmel. Ayant toujours ses racines dans un exercice de la sensibilité d’un sujet en même temps autoréférentiel et ouvert au monde, le sentiment de la nature exprime l’unité indivisible de l’humain. Étant, par contre, modélé par les différentes manifestations de la nature et prenant des formes divergentes, soit l’harmonie et la continuité, soit le conflit et la distance, c’est l’ambivalence de la nature humaine qui se révèle, aussi bien que la difficulté d’une Anthropologie comme théorie globale de l’Homme.

A famous scholar (Höffe 2005:11) remembered recently an old and well known thesis, which is generally accepted by Kantians and historians of philosophy. According to it Kant, as was of use at his time, did not teach his own philosophy. This is not the evidence, however, when we examine the Dohna-Wundlacken Lectures on Metaphysics, which Kant presented in the 1792-93 winter semester. If we take as base for analysis the text of the course transcribed by Count Heinrich L. A. zu Dohna-Wundlacken, a sharp and young Student, and Baumgarten’s Metaphysica (that Kant apparently discusses and comments in his lessons), we will see that the situation is totally different. In order to make it clear, we discuss first Kant’s criticism to the Wolffian concept of Metaphysics and present some aspects of the new concept of Metaphysics proposed by Kant in the abovementioned text. Second, we point out how Kant did make use of theses and arguments already defended in the first Critique, thus dislocating the focus of his examination from an apparent commentary to Baumgarten’s text to the exposition of his own philosophy. Finally, we try to evaluate to what extent Kant’s concept of Metaphysics defended in this Lectures do remain faithful to the teachings of the critical philosophy.

Delfim Santos foi um dos mais destacados discípulos de Leonardo Coimbra e, nesse contexto, teve ao seu dispor um ambiente especulativo propício ao contacto precoce com a filosofia de Henri Bergson. Na sequência do encontro que teve com o filósofo francês, em Paris no ano de 1935, Delfim Santos contribuiu de form a decisiva para a aproximação de uma determinada facção do pensamento português da época à filosofia de Bergson. Ainda que tenha posteriormente construído a sua própria perspectiva filosófica em estreita ligação com o pensamento alemão contemporâneo, em especial sob a influência de nomes como Heidegger ou Hartmann, os primeiros escritos de Delfim Santos deixam bem clara uma aproximação especulativa a determinadas orientações bergsonianas. Contudo, já no final da sua vida - abruptamente interrompida - , as referências a Bergson surgem a propósito da filosofia de Leonardo Coimbra e visam fundamentalmente acentuar o que para Delfim Santos constituía o antibergsonismo do antigo Mestre português.