RISULTATI RICERCA

Il neotrascendentalismo di Giovanni Emanuele Barié - Giovanni Emanuele Barié, appointed Professor of Theoretical Philosophy at Milan University in 1937, is one of the most neglected figures in Italian philosophy of the last century. An exponent of late Italian idealism, it could be argued that only through his work, alongside that of others like Bernardino Varisco, Pantaleo Carabellese and Vito Fazio Allmayer, was Italian idealism able to reach full theoretical maturity. Born in Milan in 1894, before going to university, Barié displayed great courage on the battlefield during the first world war. On his return, he first studied Law and then took a second degree in Philosophy under Piero Martinetti. In 1933, his La spiritualità dell’essere e Leibniz enabled him to obtain a university teaching post, first in Genoa, later in Rome and, finally, in Milan in the chair previously occupied by his mentor. The first period of Barié’s work is characterized by a re-evaluation of the Kantian a priori against the reductionist perspective of contemporary thought. Books like La posizione gnoseologica della matematica (1925) and Oltre la Critica (1929) belong to this stage in his life. From 1933, Barié started on an interpretation of Hegel with the intention of toning down the transcendental aspects of Kant’s and Martinetti’s thought. His most important writings from this period are L’io trascendentale (1948) and his last work Il concetto trascendentale (1957), which came out in the same year the philosopher committed suicide.

Between Leopold Ranke and Eduard Gans - Certain circumstances and stylistic considerations lead us to believe that the manuscript MS. 114 in the Mendelssohn Archive at the Staatsbibliothek in Berlin is (in part) evidence of a course in "Contemporary History" held by Leopold Ranke at the city’s university in the summer term of 1827. The course was on the chronological history of the French Revolution. Ranke had already dealt with the same subject the year before, though in a less detailed manner. And it was not until 1875 that he published a work on the period of the Revolution, but focussing solely on the war between the European powers in 1791-1792. Hence the importance of the new manuscript - in Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy’s own hand - which, previously, had been mistakenly connected with the teaching of the Hegelian jurist Eduard Gans. Mendelssohn attended his course on the French Revolution in the summer of 1828.

A forgotten document by the young Leopardi: the Disputatio and its relation to the Dissertazioni filosofiche - In this essay we look at the Disputatio, a forgotten document by the young Leopardi. It consists of a list of sixty questions, thirty written in Latin and thirty in Italian. These were the questions that Leopardi had to answer in his last public examination, held on the 20 July 1812. In the first part, the authors and sources used by Leopardi in the preparation of the exercise will be studied and compared with the text of the Disputatio. The second part is a comparison between the text of the Disputatio and that of the Dissertazioni filosofiche of 1811-1812. This comparison and consideration of the order in which the subjects are presented reveal that the Dissertazioni filosofiche were written when the poet was preparing for the above-mentioned examination, and that in the Disputatio there are thinkers and subjects, such as La Mettrie and Holbach, that were important for the development of Leopardi’s mature philosophy.