Edited by Jens Allwood, Olga Pombo, Clara Renna and Giovanni Scarafile
[Controversies 16] 2020
► pp. 155–176
This article presents the Nineteenth-Century dispute arising from the criticism that the Italian philosopher Antonio Rosmini expressed against the arguments that the statesman Melchiorre Gioja supported in defense of fashion in his Apologia della moda ‘Apology of Fashion’ (1822) and against the utilitarian ideology that permeates the text. Gioja’s aggressive answer (in 1827) leads Rosmini to write a treatise on polite manners writers must have in public debate, thus offering an interesting ethical treatise. We aim to analyze the controversy adopting an interdisciplinary approach that investigates metapragmatic evaluative comments from the point of view of argumentation in order to reconstruct the argumentative justification behind each evaluation of (im)politeness and to show the principles defended by the disputants.