The essay, based also on unpublished writings, analytically reconstructs the Italian debate concerning the problem of historical epistemology and of the different relationships that can be established between epistemological reflection and the history of science. We start from awareness, à la Lakatos, that a “history of science without philosophy of science is blind, while a philosophy of science without the history of science is empty”. However, during the twentieth century Italian different theoretical positions emerged. Giulio Preti began by underlining how (...) the history of science should be understood as the history of scientific thought. This position was close to that expressed by Giovanni Gentile for whom the history of science had to be reduced to the history of philosophy. Against this neo-realist claim, an epistemologist like Ludovico Geymonat reacted by underlining how science has its own history as a science. The critical debate between Preti and Geymonat has finally led the first to underline how the history of science must then be articulated in different conceptual traditions, while the latter ended up sharing the need to study the history of science as a history of scientific thought. (shrink)

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)

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.