Philosophy in Italy

Abstract

There has lately been published a posthumous work on “pure realism” by an Italian philosopher who died a little while ago at an early age. He had been working on the book for some time with great concentration of energy, but did not live to finish it. In the form in which it has been edited for publication some parts of it have been developed almost to completion, while others are mere sketches and notes—though not wanting in interest, for they reveal the author's method of working, and expose doubts and difficulties in the immediate form in which they presented themselves to his mind and found the way to a solution. The most complete section is one dealing with the critique of idealism, a critique which, while it is not devoid of ingenuity, is in the main stringent and vigorous, and deserves particularly the consideration of idealists. The principal thesis is that there are two possible solutions of the problem of consciousness. It admits the possibility either that consciousness itself creates its own world, endowing it, thanks to the action of the mind on its own images, with those physical attributes that make it appear external to the subject or independent of the activity by virtue of which it is formed (idealism); or that consciousness is the immediate revelation of the world itself to itself, a revelation that can only consist in a unique act whereby the world establishes itself as identical with itself and as different from itself, as internal and external knowing and known, spirit and nature (realism). At the basis of idealism, according to Ranzoli, is the implied presupposition (of the philosophy of Empedocles) that like is conscious only of like, and at the basis of realism is the Anaxagorean presupposition that opposite is conscious of opposite.