Rhetoric, anthropological models and the law

Nowadays rhetoric is mostly conceived in a negative way, as a technique used to gain persuasion, in addition to argumentation and/or against reason. The aim of my paper is to offer a completely different view on rhetoric, in the wake of the Aristotelian conception, with the basic idea is that rhetoric could have anything other than a pejorative sense and that rhetoric, despite his coming from the past, could still play a decisive role for the foundation of a highly valid account of law, coherently with the basic human right to a fair trial. An account based on the role played by the third, since rhetoric, as law and justice, is always ad alterum. From this point of view, rhetoric, as law and justice, is given within a social practice and it is more than a repertoire of means of persuasion or a theory of speaking. In the Aristotelian account, rhetoric is a way of thinking and a way of being. To be more precise, it is the zoon politikon’s way of being, i.e. the way of being of man as living in the co-original linguistic and political dimension (Heidegger 2009). This is the same frame in which legal and political deliberations take place, since «we deliberate about things that are in our power and can be done» (Arist. Nic. Eth., 3, 1112), such as what is good or evil, or just or unjust.