La storia della filosofia come frontiera. L’itinerario di Nicola Abbagnano - ASBTRACT: L’articolo ricostruisce i momenti fondamentali del percorso storiografico di Nicola Abbagnano, a partire dalla sua tesi di laurea del 1923, Le sorgenti irrazionali del pensiero, fino all’articolo Il lavoro storiografico in filosofia : l’intento di questa analisi è mostrare la centralità e la complessità della Storia della filosofia , non riducibile a semplice "appendice" storiografica del periodo esistenzialistico dell’autore. Vengono esaminate (...) in tale prospettiva le premesse teoriche dell’impostazione storiografica di Abbagnano e le difficoltà che sorgono nel concreto lavoro storiografico: la Storia della filosofia si rivela così anche opera teoretica decisiva nel passaggio al neoilluminismo, che risulta caratterizzato da un profondo ripensamento dei rapporti tra storia e filosofia. (shrink)

Il saggio vuole essere una riconsiderazione storico-teorica del modo di fare storiografia filosofica. Attraverso le critiche mosse da Francesco Bacone e Giordano Bruno al modello storiografico aristotelico, e quelle avanzate da Filippo Masci alla linea storiografica Hegel-Spaventa-Maturi-Gentile, si vuole evidenziare come sia sempre più avvertito un certo fastidio per una storia della filosofia teoreticamente orientata. Per una storia della filosofia convinta, cioè, dell’esistenza di una sola vera filosofia precedente in una direzione obbligata, al (...) fine di realizzare un telos che, pur riconosciuto a posteriori, è prefigurato. Rispetto a questo tipo di storiografia sembra da preferire il modello di storia della filosofia di tipo storico , capace di assumersi il compito fondamentale di riconoscere, approfondire e ricostruire l’originalità di pensieri di soggetti storici concreti, di pensieri degni di essere studiati nella loro autonomia e, quindi, di essere messi in correlazione con pensieri personali di altri soggetti pensanti, altrettanto liberi ed originali. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:BOOK REVIEWS 279 shirted gangsters of the totalitarian regimes. Only gradually did Sorel come to seek his paragons of virtue among the proletariat, partly because of his disillusionment with Jean Jaur~s over the Dreyfus case. Sorel had been one of the first to champion Dreyfus, but felt that demagogues had transformed the latter's cause into a new dogmatism and a new establishment. Sorel was genuinely concerned about some of (...) the deepest problems facing modern industrial man. He could not believe that they could be solved, either by "demagogic plutocracy" or by orthodox Marxism. Hence he sought to synthesize Vico, Proudhon, Marx, and Bergson in a new movement that should be both liberal and revolutionary and heroically virtuous. The strongest influence upon his thinking, says Goriely, came from Vico, from whom he borrowed "the fundamental idea of his whole work: "Man does not know what he does' " (105). History can therefore be rational only after it has happened: "The future is the field in which we use our imaginations, not our understandings" (109). That Sorel anticipated many twentieth-century developments in philosophy and politics, there can be no doubt. The author says that he was "the first philosopher in France who sought not only to locate man in history and society, but also to locate history and society in man, to give them a significance which may be called existential" (148). Before William James's pragmatism reached European shores, Sorel had made such statements as "Science is a means of verifying the possibility of acting in a certain manner." 1Even some of his pessimistic fears anticipated such developments as Burnham's "managerial revolution," at the same time that he welcomed the growth of industrial techniques in other hands (155). Professor Goriely's careful tracing of Sorel's profusion of suggestions for the ethical redemption of mankind in a machine age reveals the unreconciled contradictions in his pluralism. In the R~[lexions he could resolve the conflicts of myth versus utopia, force versus violence, liberalism versus absolutism, says Goriely, only "'by a conceptual jugglery.., which sets the mind's teeth on edge rather than stimulates it" (200). Caught between the poles of an attachment to historical tradition and to liberty, Sorel celebrated the constant tension between the two. Man lives only to create; he "has no other end than the creative ~lan itself. Born of liberty, history can never block its course.., it is always a point of departure toward the future.... Human institutions, the products of an infinity of obscure causes, never realize any universal moral principle. They live in the relative, which man ought to accept with moderation and a sense of the limits of the possible, without ever losing the sense of the unlimited" (222). HAROLD A. LARRABEE Union College 1Georges Sorel, "Storia e scienza sociale," Rivista itallana di sociologia, March-June, 1902,p. 224. Storia Della Filosofia: La Filosofia del Novecento. By E. Paolo Lamanna. Intuizionismo, filosofia dell'azione e modernismo--Prammatismo--La problematica della scienza--La problematica della storla. (Firenze: Felice Le Monnier, 1963. 671 pp. 3800 L.) This first of three volumes describing the philosophies of the twentieth century, and the fifth volume in Lamanna's History of Philosophy, is truly a monumental and encyclopedic work. In this volume alone there are concise, clear, scholarly expositions of the important ideas of more than fifty philosophers, including biographical information and bibliographical references. The style is exceptionally intelligible and the organization of even complicated materials is well defined with good headings and with definitions that are intelligible 280 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY even to a layman. The work is not only very informative but amazingly objective and dispassionate. And despite its disinterestedness it is highly interesting, for it succeeds in presenting each philosopher's ideas as one imagines he would like to present them himself, sympathetically and persuasively. One leaves the book after reading about the achievements of our own little century marvelling at the variety and range of recent achievements. For over and above our follies and horrors, these thinkers emerge as men trying hard and ably to be sane and tell the truth. Lamanna himself emerges as a mind with an extraordinary critical ability to... (shrink)

A review of L. De Crescenzo's book entitled I presocratici, first volume of a history of Greek philosophy which is meant to be popular and amusing but betrays much superficiality in the approach.

The Cambridge Platonist Henry More was fiercely averse to the Lurianic Kabbalah, with which he became acquainted through the two tomes of the Kabbala denudata. More contributed to the first tome substantially and was highly influential in shaping the reception of this work, edited by Christian Knorr von Rosenroth. He denounced the incompatibility of the Christian religion with Luria's system and in his last contribution, the Fundamenta, he put forward an apagogical argument meant to show the inconsistency of Luria's teaching. (...) The article aims at exploring the nature of More's argument so as to highlight the philosophical essence of his criticism, the intention of which was to emphasize the incompatibility of the Kabbalah with any form of rational speculation. Luria's doctrine appeared to More to be a compromise between materialism and spiritualism, a sort of hybrid theory that was even worse than materialism, given its misleading theistic appearance as well as the lack of internal coherence. This compromise was also morally unacceptable, being symptomatic of weakness of the will. (shrink)

Freedom and human nature in Antonio Genovesi. The moral experience of the human being, which is triggered by irritation of the neural network and other physiological components, has its true principle of action in free will and reason. Natural freedom constitutes the ground for the other types of freedom, which are achieved through the historical and critical use of reason, namely by applying the "benefit" principle. In outlining the nature of the human being, Antonio Genovesi compares his main ideas with (...) the most recent ideas in physics and proposes an original essay on the origins of society. It reconciles a traditional conception of universalistic ethics with a social application of Newtonian notions of centripetal and centrifugal forces. His aim is also to unify "eclectically" a universalistic with a utilitarian conception of law and justice, an ideal with an instrumental notion of reason, and a contemplation of the immutable nature of human beings with a descriptive analysis of the customs of different peoples. (shrink)

Nelle Summulae del salmantino Domingo de Soto, la teoria della proposizione sembra rivelare un’irrisolta tensione tra l’opzione per la prospettiva terministica, la quale considera il significato della proposizione come il risultato dell’analisi semantica dei suoi componenti, e l’opzione per la prospettiva ‘dictistica’, che si concentra sul riferimento e sul senso globale della proposizione. La struttura della proposizione mentale, pur determinata in maniera ‘causale’ dalle sue componenti, il nome e il verbo, viene d’altronde a costituirsi in maniera (...) ‘uni-qualitativa’, ossia per mezzo di un unico atto mentale, con il quale si designa uno stato di cose esterno . Il ‘valore di verità’ della proposizione, espresso sintatticamente mediante l’unione o la separazione di un termine da un altro, viene a denotare la conformità a un modo d’essere delle cose nella realtà. (shrink)