ABSTRACT
The history of twentieth-century Italian philosophy is strongly influenced both by the peculiar character of its evolution in the preceding century and by widespread tendencies of contemporary continental (especially German) thought. In nineteenth-century Italian philosophy we can distinguish four main trends: (1) St Augustine’s and Aquinas’s traditional dualistic metaphysics, which was renewed with some originality by the priest Antonio Rosmini Serbati (1797-1855), and was regarded by the Roman Catholic church as its ‘official’ philosophical doctrine; (2) methodological empiricism, which was developed since the Renaissance especially by the founder of modern mathematical physics, Galileo Galilei, and which found its most prominent exponent in the positivist thinker Roberto Ardigò (1828-1920); (3) the speculative German tradition of KantianHegelian idealism, according to its interpretation as a metafisica della mente, i.e. as a philosophy of pure self-consciousness, outlined by the greatest nineteenth-century Italian thinker, Bertrando Spaventa (1817-83); and finally (4) Marx’s and Engels’s historical materialism, which was spread and fostered especially by Antonio Labriola (1843-1904), who worked out a ‘humanistic’ (anti-naturalistic) interpretation of it.
