ABSTRACT
Although Foscolo never organized his philosophical thinking in a well-defined system or acknowledged the syncretic nature of his ideas, philosophical principles permeate many pages of his literary works and often surface in his private correspondence, with particular incidence during specific moments of his creative life. John Locke is the English philosopher who exerted a most significant and long-lasting influence on Foscolo's approach to knowledge and his investigation of moral principles. Thirteen years later, in the second and third of his 1809 lectures devoted to literature and morality at the University of Pavia, Foscolo acknowledges the influence of Locke's philosophy on the European Enlightenment and on his own philosophical ideas. It is, ultimately, Locke's philosophy that provides Foscolo with the gnoseological support to validate this conviction, while the unfinished work on Machiavelli proves yet again a testing ground for such ideas.
