Italy over the ages has had a vast influence
on Western philosophy, beginning with the
Greeks and Romans, and going onto Renaissance
humanism, the Age of Enlightenment and modern
philosophy.
== Greek origins ==
Philosophy was brought to Italy by Pythagoras,
founder of the Italian school of philosophy
in Crotone.
Major Italian philosophers of the Greek period
include Xenophanes, Parmenides, Zeno, Empedocles
and lastly Gorgias, responsible for bringing
philosophy to Athens.
== Ancient Rome ==
There were several formidable Roman philosophers,
such as Cicero (106–43 BC), Lucretius (94–55
BC), Seneca (4 BC – 65 AD), Musonius Rufus
(30 AD – 100 AD), Plutarch (45–120 AD),
Epictetus (55–135 AD), Marcus Aurelius (121–180
AD), Clement of Alexandria (150–215 AD),
Alcinous (2nd century AD), Sextus Empiricus
(3rd century AD), Alexander of Aphrodisias
(3rd century AD), Ammonius Saccas (3rd century
AD), Plotinus (205–270 AD), Porphyry (232–304
AD), Iamblichus (242–327 AD), Themistius
(317–388 AD), Augustine of Hippo (354–430
AD), Proclus (411–485 AD), Philoponus of
Alexandria (490–570 AD), Damascius (462–540
AD), Boethius (472–524 AD), and Simplicius
of Cilicia (490–560 AD).
Roman philosophy was heavily influenced by
that of Greece.
== Medieval ==
Italian Medieval philosophy was mainly Christian,
and included several important philosophers
and theologians such as St Thomas Aquinas.
Aquinas was the student of Albert the Great,
a brilliant Dominican experimentalist, much
like the Franciscan, Roger Bacon of Oxford
in the 13th century.
Aquinas reintroduced Aristotelian philosophy
to Christianity.
He believed that there was no contradiction
between faith and secular reason.
He believed that Aristotle had achieved the
pinnacle in the human striving for truth and
thus adopted Aristotle's philosophy as a framework
in constructing his theological and philosophical
outlook.
He was a professor at the prestigious University
of Paris.
== Renaissance ==
The Renaissance was an essentially Italian
(Florentine) movement, and also a great period
of the arts and philosophy.
Among the distinctive elements of Renaissance
philosophy are the revival (renaissance means
"rebirth") of classical civilization and learning;
a partial return to the authority of Plato
over Aristotle, who had come to dominate later
medieval philosophy; and, among some philosophers,
enthusiasm for the occult and Hermeticism.
As with all periods, there is a wide drift
of dates, reasons for categorization and boundaries.
In particular, the Renaissance, more than
later periods, is thought to begin in Italy
with the Italian Renaissance and roll through
Europe.
=== Humanism ===
Renaissance Humanism was a European intellectual
movement that was a crucial component of the
Renaissance, beginning in Florence in the
latter half of the 14th century, and affected
most of Italy.
The humanist movement developed from the rediscovery
by European scholars of Latin literary and
Greek literary texts.
Initially, a humanist was simply a scholar
or teacher of Latin literature.
By the mid-15th century humanism described
a curriculum – the studia humanitatis – consisting
of grammar, rhetoric, moral philosophy, poetry,
and history as studied via Latin and Greek
literary authors.
Humanism offered the necessary intellectual
and philological tools for the first critical
analysis of texts.
An early triumph of textual criticism by Lorenzo
Valla revealed the Donation of Constantine
to be an early medieval forgery produced in
the Curia.
This textual criticism created sharper controversy
when Erasmus followed Valla in criticizing
the accuracy of the Vulgate translation of
the New Testament, and promoting readings
from the original Greek manuscripts of the
New Testament.Italian Renaissance humanists
believed that the liberal arts (art, music,
grammar, rhetoric, oratory, history, poetry,
using classical texts, and the studies of
all of the above) should be practiced by all
levels of "richness".
They also approved of self, human worth and
individual dignity.
They hold the belief that everything in life
has a determinate nature, but man's privilege
is to be able to choose his own path.
Pico della Mirandola wrote the following concerning
the creation of the universe and man's place
in it:
But when the work was finished, the Craftsman
kept wishing that there were someone to ponder
the plan of so great a work, to love its beauty,
and to wonder at its vastness.
Therefore, when everything was done...
He finally took thought concerning the creation
of man...
He therefore took man as a creature of indeterminate
nature and, assigning him a place in the middle
of the world, addressed him thus: "Neither
a fixed abode nor a form that is thine alone
nor any function peculiar to thyself have
we given thee, Adam, to the end that according
to thy longing and according to thy judgement
thou mayest have and possess what abode, what
form and what functions thou thyself shalt
desire.
The nature of all other beings is limited
and constrained within the bounds of law.
Thou shalt have the power to degenerate into
the lower forms of life, which are brutish.
Thou shalt have the power, out of thy soul's
judgement, to be born into the higher forms,
which are divine."
=== Neoplatonism ===
Italy was also affected by a movement called
Neoplatonism, which was a movement which had
a general revival of interest in Classical
antiquity.
Interest in Platonism was especially strong
in Florence under the Medici.
During the sessions at Florence of the Council
of Ferrara-Florence in 1438–1445, during
the failed attempts to heal the schism of
the Orthodox and Catholic churches, Cosimo
de' Medici and his intellectual circle had
made acquaintance with the Neoplatonic philosopher
George Gemistos Plethon, whose discourses
upon Plato and the Alexandrian mystics so
fascinated the learned society of Florence
that they named him the second Plato.
In 1459 John Argyropoulos was lecturing on
Greek language and literature at Florence,
and Marsilio Ficino became his pupil.
When Cosimo decided to refound Plato's Academy
at Florence, his choice to head it was Ficino,
who made the classic translation of Plato
from Greek to Latin (published in 1484), as
well as a translation of a collection of Hellenistic
Greek documents of the Hermetic Corpus, and
the writings of many of the Neoplatonists,
for example Porphyry, Iamblichus, Plotinus,
et al..
Following suggestions laid out by Gemistos
Plethon, Ficino tried to synthesize Christianity
and Platonism.
=== Machiavelli ===
Niccolò di Bernardo dei Machiavelli (3 May
1469 – 21 June 1527) was an Italian philosopher
/writer, and is considered one of the most
influential Italian Renaissance philosophers
and one of the main founders of modern political
science.
His most famous work was The Prince.
The Prince's contribution to the history of
political thought is the fundamental break
between political Realism and political Idealism.
Niccolò Machiavelli’s best-known book exposits
and describes the arts with which a ruling
prince can maintain control of his realm.
It concentrates on the "new prince", under
the presumption that a hereditary prince has
an easier task in ruling, since the people
are accustomed to him.
To retain power, the hereditary prince must
carefully maintain the socio-political institutions
to which the people are accustomed; whereas
a new prince has the more difficult task in
ruling, since he must first stabilize his
new-found power in order to build an enduring
political structure.
That requires the prince being a public figure
above reproach, whilst privately acting amorally
to achieve State goals.
The examples are those princes who most successfully
obtain and maintain power, drawn from his
observations as a Florentine diplomat, and
his ancient history readings; thus, the Latin
phrases and Classic examples.
The Prince does not dismiss morality, instead,
it politically defines “Morality”—as
in the criteria for acceptable cruel action—it
must be decisive: swift, effective, and short-lived.
Machiavelli is aware of the irony of good
results coming from evil actions; notwithstanding
some mitigating themes, the Catholic Church
proscribed The Prince, registering it to the
Index Librorum Prohibitorum, moreover, the
Humanists also viewed the book negatively,
among them, Erasmus of Rotterdam.
As a treatise, its primary intellectual contribution
to the history of political thought is the
fundamental break between political Realism
and political Idealism—thus, The Prince
is a manual to acquiring and keeping political
power.
In contrast with Plato and Aristotle, a Classical
ideal society is not the aim of the prince’s
will to power.
As a political scientist, Machiavelli emphasises
necessary, methodical exercise of brute force
punishment-and-reward (patronage, clientelism,
et cetera) to preserve the status quo.
As there seems to be a very large difference
between Machiavelli's advice to ruthless and
tyrannical princes in The Prince and his more
republican exhortations in Discorsi, many
have concluded that The Prince is actually
only a satire.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, for instance, admired
Machiavelli the republican and consequently
argued that The Prince is a book for the republicans
as it exposes the methods used by princes.
If the book was only intended as a manual
for tyrannical rulers, it contains a paradox:
it would apparently be more effective if the
secrets it contains would not be made publicly
available.
Also Antonio Gramsci argued that Machiavelli's
audience was the common people because the
rulers already knew these methods through
their education.
This interpretation is supported by the fact
that Machiavelli wrote in Italian, not in
Latin (which would have been the language
of the ruling elite).
Although Machiavelli is supposed to be a realist,
many of his heroes in The Prince are in fact
mythical or semi-mythical, and his goal (i.e.
the unification of Italy) essentially utopian
at the time of writing.
Etymologically, his 16th-century contemporaries
adopted and used the adjective Machiavellian
(elaborately cunning), often in the introductions
of political tracts offering more than government
by “Reasons of State”, most notably those
of Jean Bodin and Giovanni Botero; while contemporary,
pejorative usage of Machiavellian (anti-Machiavellism
in the 16th century) is an adjective describing
someone who is "marked by cunning, duplicty,
or bad faith".
The Prince is the treatise that is most responsible
for the term being brought about.
Machiavellianism remains a popular speech
and journalism usage; while in psychology,
it denotes a personality type.
== Age of Enlightenment ==
Italy was also affected by the enlightenment,
a movement which was a consequence of the
Renaissance and changed the road of Italian
philosophy.
Followers of the group often met to discuss
in private salons and coffeehouses, notably
in the cities of Milan, Rome and Venice.
Cities with important universities such as
Padua, Bologna and Naples, however, also remained
great centres of scholarship and the intellect,
with several philosophers such as Giambattista
Vico (1668–1744) (who is widely regarded
as being the founder of modern Italian philosophy)
and Antonio Genovesi.
Italian society also dramatically changed
during the Enlightenment, with rulers such
as Leopold II of Tuscany abolishing the death
penalty.
The church's power was significantly reduced,
and it was a period of great thought and invention,
with scientists such as Alessandro Volta and
Luigi Galvani discovering new things and greatly
contributing to Western science.
Cesare Beccaria was also one of the greatest
Italian Enlightenment writers, who was famous
for his masterpiece Of Crimes and Punishments
(1764), which was later translated into 22
languages.
== Early modern and 19th-century philosophy
==
Italy also had a renowned philosophical movement
in the 1800s, with Idealism, Sensism and Empiricism.
The main Sensist Italian philosophers were
Gioja (1767–1829) and Romagnosi (1761–1835).
Criticism of the Sensist movement came from
other philosophers such as Pasquale Galluppi
(1770–1846), who affirmed that a priori
relationships were synthetic.
Antonio Rosmini, instead, was the founder
of Italian Idealism.
The most comprehensive view of Rosmini's philosophical
standpoint is to be found in his Sistema filosofico,
in which he set forth the conception of a
complete encyclopaedia of the human knowable,
synthetically conjoined, according to the
order of ideas, in a perfectly harmonious
whole.
Contemplating the position of recent philosophy
from Locke to Hegel, and having his eye directed
to the ancient and fundamental problem of
the origin, truth and certainty of our ideas,
he wrote: "If philosophy is to be restored
to love and respect, I think it will be necessary,
in part, to return to the teachings of the
ancients, and in part to give those teachings
the benefit of modern methods" (Theodicy,
a.
148).
He examined and analysed the fact of human
knowledge, and obtained the following results:
that the notion or idea of being or existence
in general enters into, and is presupposed
by, all our acquired cognitions, so that,
without it, they would be impossible
that this idea is essentially objective, inasmuch
as what is seen in it is as distinct from
and opposed to the mind that sees it as the
light is from the eye that looks at it
that it is essentially true, because being
and truth are convertible terms, and because
in the vision of it the mind cannot err, since
error could only be committed by a judgment,
and here there is no judgment, but a pure
intuition affirming nothing and denying nothing
that by the application of this essentially
objective and true idea the human being intellectually
perceives, first, the animal body individually
conjoined with him, and then, on occasion
of the sensations produced in him not by himself,
the causes of those sensations, that is, from
the action felt he perceives and affirms an
agent, a being, and therefore a true thing,
that acts on him, and he thus gets at the
external world, these are the true primitive
judgments, containing
the subsistence of the particular being (subject),
and
its essence or species as determined by the
quality of the action felt from it (predicate)
that reflection, by separating the essence
or species from the subsistence, obtains the
full specific idea (universalization), and
then from this, by leaving aside some of its
elements, the abstract specific idea (abstraction)
that the mind, having reached this stage of
development, can proceed to further and further
abstracts, including the first principles
of reasoning, the principles of the several
sciences, complex ideas, groups of ideas,
and so on without end
finally, that the same most universal idea
of being, this generator and formal element
of all acquired cognitions, cannot itself
be acquired, but must be innate in us, implanted
by God in our nature.
Being, as naturally shining to our mind, must
therefore be what men call the light of reason.
Hence the name Rosmini gives it of ideal being;
and this he laid down as the fundamental principle
of all philosophy and the supreme criterion
of truth and certainty.
This he believed to be the teaching of St
Augustine, as well as of St Thomas, of whom
he was an ardent admirer and defender.In the
19th century, there were also several other
movements which gained some form of popularity
in Italy, such as Ontologism.
The main Italian son of this philosophical
movement was Vincenzo Gioberti (1801–1852),
who was a priest and a metaphysician.
Gioberti's writings are more important than
his political career.
In the general history of European philosophy
they stand apart.
As the speculations of Rosmini-Serbati, against
which he wrote, have been called the last
link added to medieval thought, so the system
of Gioberti, known as Ontologism, more especially
in his greater and earlier works, is unrelated
to other modern schools of thought.
It shows a harmony with the Roman Catholic
faith which caused Cousin to declare that
Italian philosophy was still in the bonds
of theology, and that Gioberti was no philosopher.
Method is with him a synthetic, subjective
and psychological instrument.
He reconstructs, as he declares, ontology,
and begins with the ideal formula, the "Ens"
creates ex nihilo the existent.
God is the only being (Ens); all other things
are merely existences.
God is the origin of all human knowledge (called
lidea, thought), which is one and so to say
identical with God himself.
It is directly beheld (intuited) by reason,
but in order to be of use it has to be reflected
on, and this by means of language.
A knowledge of being and existences (concrete,
not abstract) and their mutual relations,
is necessary as the beginning of philosophy.
Gioberti is in some respects a Platonist.
He identifies religion with civilization,
and in his treatise Del primato morale e civile
degli Italiani arrives at the conclusion that
the church is the axis on which the well-being
of human life revolves.
In it he affirms the idea of the supremacy
of Italy, brought about by the restoration
of the papacy as a moral dominion, founded
on religion and public opinion.
In his later works, the Rinnovamento and the
Protologia, he is thought by some to have
shifted his ground under the influence of
events.
His first work, written when he was thirty-seven,
had a personal reason for its existence.
A young fellow-exile and friend, Paolo Pallia,
having many doubts and misgivings as to the
reality of revelation and a future life, Gioberti
at once set to work with La Teorica del sovrannaturale,
which was his first publication (1838).
After this, philosophical treatises followed
in rapid succession.
The Teorica was followed by Introduzione allo
studio della filosofia in three volumes (1839–1840).
In this work he states his reasons for requiring
a new method and new terminology.
Here he brings out the doctrine that religion
is the direct expression of the idea in this
life, and is one with true civilization in
history.
Civilization is a conditioned mediate tendency
to perfection, to which religion is the final
completion if carried out; it is the end of
the second cycle expressed by the second formula,
the Ens redeems existences.
Essays (not published till 1846) on the lighter
and more popular subjects, Del bello and Del
buono, followed the Introduzione.
Del primato morale e civile degli Italiani
and the Prolegomeni to the same, and soon
afterwards his triumphant exposure of the
Jesuits, Il Gesuita moderno, no doubt hastened
the transfer of rule from clerical to civil
hands.
It was the popularity of these semi-political
works, increased by other occasional political
articles, and his Rinnovamento civile d'Italia,
that caused Gioberti to be welcomed with such
enthusiasm on his return to his native country.
All these works were perfectly orthodox, and
aided in drawing the liberal clergy into the
movement which has resulted since his time
in the unification of Italy.
The Jesuits, however, closed round the pope
more firmly after his return to Rome, and
in the end Gioberti's writings were placed
on the Index.
The remainder of his works, especially La
Filosofia della Rivelazione and the Prolologia,
give his mature views on many points.
Other Ontological philosophers include Terenzio
Mamiani (1800–1885), Ferri (1826–1895),
and Ausonio Franchi (1821–1895).Hegelianism,
Scholasticism and Positivism.
Augusto Vera (1813–1885) was probably the
greatest Italian Hegelianist philosopher,
who composed works in both French and Italian.
It was during his studies, with his cousin
in Paris, that he came to know about philosophy
and through them he acquired knowledge of
Hegelianism and it culminated during the events
of the 1848–49 French revolution.
In England he continued his studies of Hegelian
philosophy.
During his years in Naples, he would maintain
relationships with the Philosophical Society
of Berlin, which originally consisted of Hegelians,
and kept up to date with both the German and
the French Hegelian literature.
As a teacher, he undertook the translation
of Hegel's Introduzione alla filosofia (Introduction
to philosophy) in French.
A lot of his work on neo-Hegelian theories
were undertaken with Bertrando Spaventa.
Some works see the Italian Hegelian doctrine
as having led to Italian Fascism.
== Modern, contemporary and 20th-century philosophy
==
Some of the most prominent philosophies and
ideologies in Italy during the late 19th and
20th centuries included anarchism, communism,
socialism, futurism, fascism, and Christian
democracy.
Both futurism and fascism (in its original
form, now often distinguished as Italian fascism)
were developed in Italy at this time.
From the 1920s to the 1940s, Italian Fascism
was the official philosophy and ideology of
the Italian government.
Giovanni Gentile was one of the greatest Italian
20th-century Idealist/Fascist philosophers,
who greatly supported Benito Mussolini.
He had great a number of developments within
his thought and career which defined his philosophy.
The discovery of Actual Idealism in his work
Theory of the Pure Act (1903)
The political favour he felt for the invasion
of Libya (1911) and the entry of Italy into
World War I (1915)
The dispute with Benedetto Croce over the
historic inevitability of Fascism.
His role as education minister (1923)
His belief that Fascism could be made to be
subservient to his thought and the gathering
of influence through the work of such students
as Ugo Spirito.Benedetto Croce wrote that
Gentile "...holds the honor of having been
the most rigorous neo–Hegelian in the entire
history of Western philosophy and the dishonor
of having been the official philosopher of
Fascism in Italy."
His philosophical basis for fascism was rooted
in his understanding of ontology and epistemology,
in which he found vindication for the rejection
of individualism, acceptance of collectivism,
with the state as the ultimate location of
authority and loyalty to which the individual
found in the conception of individuality no
meaning outside of the state (which in turn
justified totalitarianism).
Ultimately, Gentile foresaw a social order
wherein opposites of all kinds weren't to
be given sanction as existing independently
from each other; that 'publicness' and 'privateness'
as broad interpretations were currently false
as imposed by all former kinds of Government;
capitalism, communism, and that only the reciprocal
totalitarian state of Corporative Syndicalism,
a Fascist state, could defeat these problems
made from reifying as an external that which
is in fact to Gentile only a thinking reality.
Whereas it was common in the philosophy of
the time to see conditional subject as abstract
and object as concrete, Gentile postulated
the opposite, that subject was the concrete
and objectification was abstraction (or rather;
that what was conventionally dubbed "subject"
was in fact only conditional object, and that
true subject was the 'act of' being or essence
above any object).
Gentile was a notable philosophical theorist
of his time throughout Europe, since having
developed his 'Actual Idealism' system of
Idealism, sometimes called 'Actualism.'
It was especially in which his ideas put subject
to the position of a transcending truth above
positivism that garnered attention; by way
that all senses about the world only take
the form of ideas within one's mind in any
real sense; to Gentile even the analogy between
the function & location of the physical brain
with the functions of the physical body were
a consistent creation of the mind (and not
brain; which was a creation of the mind and
not the other way around).
An example of Actual Idealism in Theology
is the idea that although man may have invented
the concept of God, it does not make God any
less real in any sense possible as far as
it is not presupposed to exist as abstraction
and except in case qualities about what existence
actually entails (i.e. being invented apart
from the thinking making it) are presupposed.
Benedetto Croce objected that Gentile's "pure
act" is nothing other than Schopenhauer's
will.
Therefore, Gentile proposed a form of what
he called 'absolute Immanentism' in which
the divine was the present conception of reality
in the totality of one's individual thinking
as an evolving, growing and dynamic process.
Many times accused of Solipsism, Gentile maintained
his philosophy to be a Humanism that sensed
the possibility of nothing beyond what was
contingent; the self's human thinking, in
order to communicate as immanence is to be
human like oneself, made a cohesive empathy
of the self-same, without an external division,
and therefore not modeled as objects to one's
own thinking.
Meanwhile, anarchism, communism, and socialism,
though not originating in Italy, took significant
hold in Italy during the early 20th century,
with the country producing numerous significant
figures in anarchist, socialist, and communist
thought.
In addition, anarcho-communism first fully
formed into its modern strain within the Italian
section of the First International.
Italian anarchists often adhered to forms
of anarcho-communism, illegalist or insurrectionary
anarchism, collectivist anarchism, anarcho-syndicalism,
and platformism.
Some of the most important figures in the
late 19th and 20th century anarchist movement
include Italians such as Errico Malatesta,
Giuseppe Fanelli, Carlo Cafiero, Alfredo M.
Bonanno, Pietro Gori, Luigi Galleani, Severino
Di Giovanni, Giuseppe Ciancabilla, Luigi Fabbri,
Camillo Berneri, and Sacco and Vanzetti.
Other Italian figures influential in both
the anarchist and socialist movements include
Carlo Tresca and Andrea Costa, as well as
the author, director, and intellectual Pier
Paolo Pasolini.
Antonio Gramsci remains an important philosopher
within Marxist and communist theory, credited
with creating the theory of cultural hegemony.
Italian philosophers were also influential
in the development of the non-Marxist liberal
socialism philosophy, including Carlo Rosselli,
Norberto Bobbio, Piero Gobetti, Aldo Capitini,
and Guido Calogero.
In the 1960s, many Italian left-wing activists
adopted the anti-authoritarian pro-working
class leftist theories that would become known
as autonomism and operaismo.
Early and important Italian feminists include
Sibilla Aleramo, Alaide Gualberta Beccari,
and Anna Maria Mozzoni, though proto-feminist
philosophies had previously been touched upon
by earlier Italian writers such as Christine
de Pizan, Moderata Fonte, Lucrezia Marinella.
The Italian physician and educator Maria Montessori
is credited with the creation of the philosophy
of education that bears her name, an educational
philosophy now practiced throughout the world.
== See also ==
List of Italian philosophers
== References ==
