Italian philosophy
Over the ages, Italian philosophy had a vast influence on Western philosophy, beginning with the Greeks and Romans, and going onto Renaissance humanism, the Age of Enlightenment and modern philosophy. Philosophy was brought to Italy by Pythagoras, founder of the school of philosophy in Crotone, Magna Graecia. Major philosophers of Magna Graecia include Parmenides, Zeno, Empedocles and Gorgias. Roman philosophers include Cicero, Lucretius, Seneca the Younger, Musonius Rufus, Plutarch, Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, Clement of Alexandria, Sextus Empiricus, Alexander of Aphrodisias, Plotinus, Porphyry, Iamblichus, Augustine of Hippo, Philoponus of Alexandria and Boethius.
Italian Medieval philosophy was mainly Christian, and included philosophers and theologians such as St Thomas Aquinas, the foremost classical proponent of natural theology and the father of Thomism, who reintroduced Aristotelian philosophy to Christianity. Notable Renaissance philosophers include: Giordano Bruno, one of the major scientific figures of the western world; Marsilio Ficino, one of the most influential humanist philosophers of the period; and Niccolò Machiavelli, one of the main founders of modern political science. Italy was also affected by the Enlightenment. University cities such as Padua, Bologna and Naples remained centres of scholarship and the intellect, with several philosophers such as Giambattista Vico and Antonio Genovesi. Cesare Beccaria was a significant Enlightenment figure and is now considered one of the fathers of classical criminal theory as well as modern penology.
Italy also had a renowned philosophical movement in the 1800s, with Idealism, Sensism and Empiricism. The main Sensist Italian philosophers were Melchiorre Gioja and Gian Domenico Romagnosi. Criticism of the Sensist movement came from other philosophers such as Pasquale Galluppi. Antonio Rosmini, instead, was the founder of Italian idealism. During the late 19th and 20th centuries, there were also several other movements which gained some form of popularity in Italy, such as Ontologism, anarchism, communism, socialism, futurism, fascism and Christian democracy. Giovanni Gentile and Benedetto Croce were two of the most significant 20th-century Idealist philosophers. Antonio Gramsci remains a relevant philosopher within Marxist and communist theory, credited with creating the theory of cultural hegemony. Italian philosophers were also influential in the development of the non-Marxist liberal socialism philosophy, including Carlo Rosselli, Norberto Bobbio, Piero Gobetti and Aldo Capitini. In the 1960s, many Italian left-wing activists adopted the anti-authoritarian pro-working class leftist theories that would become known as autonomism and operaismo.
Early Italian feminists include Sibilla Aleramo, Alaide Gualberta Beccari, and Anna Maria Mozzoni, though proto-feminist philosophies had previously been touched upon by earlier Italian writers such as Christine de Pizan, Moderata Fonte, and Lucrezia Marinella. Italian physician and educator Maria Montessori is credited with the creation of the philosophy of education that bears her name, an educational philosophy now practiced throughout the world. Giuseppe Peano was one of the inspirers of analytic philosophy and contemporary philosophy of mathematics. Recent analytic philosophers include Carlo Penco, Gloria Origgi, Pieranna Garavaso and Luciano Floridi.
Greek origins
Philosophy was brought to Italy by Pythagoras, founder of the school of philosophy in Crotone, Magna Graecia. Major philosophers of the Greek period include Parmenides, Zeno, Empedocles and Gorgias.Parmenides has been considered the founder of ontology or metaphysics and has influenced the whole history of Western philosophy. His single known work, a poem later titled On Nature, has survived only in fragments. Approximately 160 verses remain today from an original total that was probably near 800. The poem was originally divided into three parts: An introductory proem which explains the purpose of the work, a former section known as "The Way of Truth", and a latter section known as "The Way of Appearance/Opinion".
Empedocles' philosophy is best known for originating the cosmogonic theory of the four classical elements. Empedocles is considered the last Greek philosopher to write in verse. There is a debate about whether the surviving fragments of his teaching should be attributed to two separate poems, "Purifications" and "On Nature", with different subject matter, or whether they may all derive from one poem with two titles, or whether one title refers to part of the whole poem. Some scholars argue that the title "Purifications" refers to the first part of a larger work called "On Nature".
Gorgias, along with Protagoras, forms the first generation of Sophists. "Like other Sophists, he was an itinerant that practiced in various cities and giving public exhibitions of his skill at the great pan-Hellenic centers of Olympia and Delphi, and charged fees for his instruction and performances. A special feature of his displays was to ask miscellaneous questions from the audience and give impromptu replies." He has been called "Gorgias the Nihilist" although the degree to which this epithet adequately describes his philosophy is controversial.
Ancient Rome
was heavily influenced by the ancient Greeks and the schools of Hellenistic philosophy; however, unique developments in philosophical schools of thought occurred during the Roman period as well. Interest in philosophy was first excited at Rome in 155 BC, by an Athenian embassy consisting of the Academic skeptic Carneades, the Stoic Diogenes of Babylon, and the Peripatetic Critolaus.During this time Athens declined as an intellectual center of thought while new sites such as Alexandria and Rome hosted a variety of philosophical discussion. Both leading schools of law of the Roman period, the Sabinian and the Proculean Schools, drew their ethical views from readings on the Stoics and Epicureans respectively, allowing for the competition between thought to manifest in a new field in Rome's jurisprudence. It was during this period that a common tradition of the western philosophical literature was born in commenting on the works of Aristotle.
There were several formidable Roman philosophers, such as Cicero, Lucretius, Seneca, Musonius Rufus, Plutarch, Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, Clement of Alexandria, Alcinous, Sextus Empiricus, Alexander of Aphrodisias, Ammonius Saccas, Plotinus, Porphyry, Iamblichus, Themistius, Augustine of Hippo, Proclus, Philoponus of Alexandria, Damascius, Boethius, and Simplicius of Cilicia.
Medieval
Italian Medieval philosophy was mainly Christian, and included several important philosophers and theologians such as Anselm of Aosta. Born in 1033 in Aosta, in his mid-twenties Anselm entered the Benedictine school at Bec in Normandy where he came under the tutelage of Lanfranc.In 1063 Anselm succeeded Lanfranc as prior and was consecrated abbot in 1078. Anselm held the office of Archbishop of Canterbury from 1093 to 1109. He is famed as the originator of the ontological argument for the existence of God and of the satisfaction theory of atonement. Anselm's works are considered philosophical as well as theological since they endeavour to render Christian tenets of faith, traditionally taken as a revealed truth, as a rational system.
Among the Italian medieval philosophers who exerted the greatest influence a very important one is Peter Lombard. Born in Lumellogno, in the region of Novara, Italy, Peter studied first in the cathedral school of Rheims. In 1136 he arrived in Paris with a letter of introduction from Bernard of Clairvaux to Gilduin, abbot of the house of Saint Victor, where Hugh of Saint Victor was the leading thinker.
Peter became a Master of Arts in the Parisian schools by 1143 or 1144. In 1145 he was made a canon of the cathedral of Notre-Dame in Paris. By 1156, perhaps earlier, Peter was archdeacon of Paris; in 1159 he became bishop of Paris. Peter's most enduring contribution to medieval thought was the Sententiae in IV libris distinctae, a systematic investigation of the whole range of questions that arise under the topic now designated ‘theology’. Often presented in modern scholarship as merely a collection of the opinions of earlier authorities on theological topics, the Sententiae is now recognized as a sophisticated work that resolves major theological issues with skill and insight. Generations of university scholars, including Thomas Aquinas, wrote commentaries on it as part of their theological education and teaching. Peter also wrote influential biblical commentaries on the Psalms and the Pauline epistles.
The most important Italian medieval philosopher is St Thomas Aquinas, the foremost classical proponent of natural theology and the father of Thomism. Aquinas was the student of Albert the Great, a brilliant Dominican experimentalist, much like the Franciscan, Roger Bacon of Oxford in the 13th century.
Aquinas reintroduced Aristotelian philosophy to Christianity. He believed that there was no contradiction between faith and secular reason. He believed that Aristotle had achieved the pinnacle in the human striving for truth and thus adopted Aristotle's philosophy as a framework in constructing his theological and philosophical outlook. He was a professor at the prestigious University of Paris.
He argued that God is the source of both the light of natural reason and the light of faith. He has been described as "the most influential thinker of the medieval period" and "the greatest of the medieval philosopher-theologians." His influence on Western thought is considerable, and much of modern philosophy is derived from his ideas, particularly in the areas of ethics, natural law, metaphysics, and political theory.
The Catholic Church honors Thomas Aquinas as a saint and regards him as the model teacher for those studying for the priesthood, and indeed the highest expression of both natural reason and speculative theology. In modern times, under papal directives, the study of his works was long used as a core of the required program of study for those seeking ordination as priests or deacons, as well as for those in religious formation and for other students of the sacred disciplines.
Next to Aquinas ranks Bonaventure, perhaps the foremost Franciscan theologian of the 13th century, whose only real rival, in terms of immediate and ultimate influence, is the Scottish Duns Scotus.
A disciple of Alexander of Hales and John of La Rochelle, Bonaventure was an Augustinian, rejecting much of the Aristotelianism incorporated by his contemporary Thomas Aquinas. While Siger of Brabant and Boetius of Dacia, defended an Aristotle tainted with Averroism and Thomas Aquinas tried to give the Philosopher a theologically acceptable interpretation, Bonaventure moved in completely different way. Aristotle for him was an authority who must be read critically and with eyes open.
When in 1273 he gave his conferences on the Hexameron, he denounced the nefarious influence of Aristotle in Theology and undertook to expound what, according to him, Christian wisdom consisted in. This Christian wisdom that he intended to expound determined the sources of his knowledge; his choice was significant, since he turned more readily to Pseudo-Dionysius than to Aristotle. That is to say that he intended to construct a spiritual synthesis and not a rationally scientific work. In works such as Breviloquium or De triplici via, Bonaventure describes theology as wisdom rather than science and considers its main task to be the achievement of spiritual perfection.