Neo-positivism and Italian philosophy

Paolo Parrini

pp. 275-294

in: Jan Woleński, Eckehart Köhler (eds), Alfred Tarski and the Vienna circle, Berlin, Springer, 1999

Abstract

In the inter-war period Italian philosophical culture was dominated by idealistic, spiritualistic and religious brands of philosophies, among which Benedetto Croce's and Giovanni Gentile's kinds of idealism were the prevailing ones. These idealistic philosophies were characterized by a strong aversion for positivistic, pragmatist and scientific philosophies which, in the first decades of our century, were represented in Italy above all by Giovanni Vailati, Mario Calderoni (both of them were to deeply affect Bruno de Finetti's philosophical ideas on probability¹), Giuseppe Peano and Federigo Enriques. Italian "scientific philosophy' lost in the battle with Croce's and Gentile's idealistic philosophies. On the political level, the hegemony of Croce and Gentile coincided with the years of Fascist dictatorship (from an ideological point of view, Croce was an opponent of Fascism, while Gentile was the greatest philosophical representative of it). On the cultural level, this hegemony caused the suppression of scientific culture and philosophy (for a long time represented chiefly by Enriques) in comparison with humanistic culture, and the subsequent philosophical isolation of Italy from the majority of the movements of scientific philosophy working in those years in the other European countries and in the United States of America.

Cited authors

Croce Benedetto

Enriques Federigo

Gentile Giovanni

Peano Giuseppe