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Nicola Abbagnano (July 1901 – September 1990) was
an Italian existential philosopher.
He was the first born son of a middle-class professional family, whose father was a
lawyer.
He studied in Naples and in November 1922 took a degree in philosophy with a thesis
that became the subject of his first book
Le sorgenti irrazionali del pensiero
(1923). His mentor was Antonio Aliotta.
In the following years he taught philosophy and history at the Liceo Umberto I° in
Naples and from 1917 to 1936 he was the professor of philosophy and pedagogy in the
Istituto di Magistero Suor Orsola Benincasa. At the same time he actively
contributed as secretary of its editorial staff to the review "Logos" edited by his
mentor Aliotta. From 1936 to 1976 he was full professor of the History of
Philosophy, first at the school of Education and then from 1939 in the Faculty of
Letters and philosophy at the University of Turin. Immediately after World War II
he was among the founders of the Centro di studi metodologici in Turin. With his
student,
Franco Ferrarotti
,Abbagnano founded in 1950 the
"Quaderni di sociologia"
and from 1952 he was joint editor with
Norberto Bobbio
of the "Rivista di
filosofia".
Then from 1952 to 1960 he inspired the group of scholars for a "New Enlightenment"
and organized a series of conventions attended by the philosophers who were engaged
in the construction of a "lay" philosophy and who were interested in the main
trends of the foreign philosophical thought. In 1964 he began his contributions to
the Turin newspaper "
La Stampa
". In 1972 he moved to Milan and discontinued his contributions to "La Stampa", but
began writing for Indro Montanelli's " Giornale". In Milan he held the office of Town
Councillo, elected from in the lists of the Liberal Party, and was also the
Councillor of Culture. He died on September 9th, 1990, and was buried in the
cemetery of Santa Margherita Ligure, the Riviera town where he had spent his
vacations for many years.
During the Neapolitan period Abbagnano's theoretical work is represented by
Le sorgenti irrazionali del pensiero
(1923), as well as
Il problema dell'arte
(1925),
La fisica nuova
(1934) e
Il principio della metafisica
(1936). These works are all influenced by the teaching of Aliotta, who encouraged
Abbagnano's interest in the methodological problems of science. Equally influential
was the anti-idealist controversy that is particularly evident in his volume on
art. After moving to Turin, Abbagnano turned to the study of existentialism, which
by this time was also the interest of the general Italian philosophical culture. He
formulated an original version of existentialism in a book that was known
widely,
La struttura dell'esistenza
(1939), which was followed by his
Introduzione all'esistenzialismo
(1942) and a set of essays collected in
Filosofia religione scienza
(1947) and by
Esistenzialismo positivo
(1948). In 1943 he played a very important part in the debate on existentialism
that appeared in "
Primato
" the review of the fascist opposition led by Giuseppe Bottai. But already in the
first years after the war, Abbagnano's interest turned to American pragmatism,
above all in the version offered by John Dewey to the philosophy of science and to
neopositivism. In existentialism, having freed himself from the negative
implications he found in Heidegger, in Jaspers, in Sartre, in Dewey's pragmatism
and in neopositivism, Abagnano saw the signs of a new philosophical trend, that he
called a "New Enlightenment" in an article written in 1948. The development of his
thought in the fifties was precisely characterized both by his interest in science,
in particular, sociology, and by an attempt to define the program of a philosophy,
that he first called a "New Enlightenment" and later a "methodological empirism".
To this period belong the essays collected in
Possibilità e libertà
(1956) and in
Problemi di sociologia
(1959) but, above all belongs the
Dizionario di filosofia
(1961), a true "summa" meant to clarify the principal concepts of
philosophy.
Besides the volumes and the essays of theoretical character, Nicola Abbagnano,
since his youth, had published many historical monographs
Il nuovo idealismo inglese e americano
(1927),
La filosofia di E. Meyerson e la logica dell'identità
(1929),
Guglielmo d'Ockham
(1933),
La nozione del tempo secondo Aristotele
(1933),
Bernardino Telesio
(1941). But his major historiographic work is found in the
Storia della filosofia
published by UTET (1946-1950) which was preceded by the Compendio di storia della filosofia (1945-47),
a kind of textbook. A few years later the latter was followed by a collection
entitled Storia delle scienze which
he coordinated for UTET (1962).
The production of the last decades, starting from 1965, above all consists in
articles which appeared in " La
Stampa" and in "Giornale"
that were later assembled in different collections,
Per o contro l'uomo
(1968),
Fra il tutto e il nulla
(1943),
Questa pazza filosofia
(1979),
L'uomo progetto Duemila
(1980),
La saggezza della vita
(1985),
La saggezza della filosofia
(1987). His last book, written few months before his death, is autobiographical
whose title is
Ricordi di un filosofo
(1990).
Source : Some of the information on this page came
from a Wikipedia article and is licensed under the GNU Documentation
License. ©2008 www.geneticmatrix.com.
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