A study on the nature of persuasive discourse in St.Augustine's philosophy, aiming at showing that in Augustine's thought an argumentation finalized to be effective must be truth-oriented. In this sense (dating back to Aristotle) a true persuasion, or to say better rhetoric, is completely different from sophistic, which is finalized to persuade without any search for truth.

An analysis on St. Augustine's dialogue on the usefulness of faith (De utilitate credendi), where the distinction between authority and faith is critically discussed.

Enrico Opocher, one of the most important Italian legal philosophers in the last century, died on March 3, 2004. For almost four decades, he was Director of the prestigious Insitute of Philosophy of Law and Comparative Law in the University of Padua. Together with Norberto Bobbio, Sergio Cotta, Uberto Scarpelli and few others, he represented a generation as well as a season of deep renewal in Italian philosophy of law and politics. In the legal thought of the postwar period, Opocher (...) became the point of reference for all those who neither wanted to join the old tradition (substantially neo-scholastic) of natural law thinking, nor believed in Kelsen’s triumphant legalistic normativism. My contribution is devoted to focusing on that part of Opocher’s thought in which the Paduan philosopher defines “justice” as “a value which makes the law count” (in the sense of its “duration”) and puts in contact this peculiar concept of justice with the problem of the verification of truth in trials and lawsuits. My thesis comes from the analysis of the Opocher’s conception of “judicial truth” as a truth obtained by reflecting facts which are relevant to norms. In the course of my analysis, I criticize all interpretations which reduce judicial truth-seeking to the empirical method. My aim is to move it from the level of mere factual description to the one of “logical demonstration according to the circumstances”. This movement from the descriptive niveau to the argumentative one, will be justified through the adoption of the perspective of classical rethorics, based on Aristotle and Cicero, which shows how judicial truth (intended in the sense of entymematic demonstration) was much more coherent with the very idea of Opocher’s conception of justice. (shrink)

This short essay aims at discussing the opposition between two different views on limits in legal interpretations: I will call them “no-limits option” and “pro-limits option”. As for, it is based on a widely diffused understanding of individual freedom: that of an unceasing breaking of all limits. This idea involves nowadays not only a number of once accepted moral limits, nor the material or social limits suffered by people, but also the limits of conceptual determinations. As for, it is based (...) on the conjecture that limit would be the condition of “no longer, not yet”—as such, a matter of authentic freedom. The “no-limits option” can easily lead, in legal interpretation, to a radical contextualism according to which there would be unlimited meanings for a syntactically and semantically same legal text. The “pro-limits option”, on the contrary, maintains that the existence of limits is reasonable, and that reasonableness is itself a limit to interpretation. In other words, the undetermined space of “no longer, not yet” in which the limits consist of is open to exploration on and beyond through appropriate procedures of reason-giving. According to the “pro-limits option”, a reasonably common core-meaning of a legal text should be sought also when cases of application vary—and that would be precisely the nature of legal interpretation. Arguments in favor of this thesis can be found in Western philosophy from Aristotle to contemporary neurosciences. A remarkable consequence of my discussion on these two options deals with the concept of normativity, given that option conceives normativity only as an expression of will, whereas option links normativity to reasonableness. (shrink)