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.