La filosofia è un discorso pubblico? Medialità e mediaticità del discorso filosofico

Today, in talking about public sphere and the possible role of philosophy in it, one can not but refer to information technology. However, in order to investigate the relationship of the philosophical discourse with the environments of the digital age, seems appropriate to start from the more general question of the status of philosophy itself, as well as from its relationship with persuasion and the rhetorical dimension. The basic question to which this essay is intended to answer is the following: in what sense is philosophy a public discourse? In what terms, moreover, does the reconfiguration of the public/private distinction determined by digi-tal media influence the nature of the philosophical debate, its internal dynam-ics, its objectives and its diffusion? First of all, the article will reconstruct, in particular through an analysis of the Platonic Phaedrus, the common origins and a certain consubstantiality of philosophical thought and its rhetorical manifestation. Starting from this assumption the thesis according to which philosophy has always been and, in a certain sense, must be philosophy of communication will be supported. The specificity of the relationship between philosophy and communication lies in its being always mediology in the sense of a discourse in, of, and on the medium, medium and medium. Finally, this retrospective redefinition of the status of philosophy will be applied to the context of Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC) in order to understand how reflection can recover its role of taking a critical distance in the current public context.