ABSTRACT
The epistle 1.7 of Familiares is dedicated to the vituperations at the "dialetic masters" and it is related to the battles taken over Petrarch's literary works. As it is widely known the latin prose is the field choosen by the Poet to express his ideas against the knowledge in the scholastic ways as practicated at the great universitaries centres of the period just like Paris and Oxford. In general lines the referred epistle acts out a collision between those two opposites conceptions of Philosophy, two irreconcilables images of sapientia in its respective discursives practices. On the one side, as vituperation's subject, the dialetics or the magistri artium are represented as men provided of very refinated techniques of silogistic's argumentation frequently instrumentalized in infinite disputationes. On the other side emerges the sage`s ethos that Petrarch forges for himself as a moral preceptor in Seneca's manner, emulating a notion of Philosophy characterized essentially by a moral and practical content, as an ethical therapy against the passions and as route to the tranquility of soul and to eternal beatitude.
Keywords:
Petrarch; Seneca; Dialetics; Liberal arts.