The Italian Historiography of Philosophy: Eclecticism and the Philosophy of Experience

Abstract

AbstractDuring the age of the Restoration (1815–1848), Italian culture was marked by the increasing spread of the Romantic movement and a new reference to the Christian tradition. Even so, we should not generalise: the tendency to rediscover Christianity as a spiritual and cultural force in a figure like Alessandro Manzoni, for example, was paralleled by another legacy of Enlightenment culture in the field of the social sciences and economics (this is the case of Melchiorre Gioia, Giandomenico Romagnosi, and Giuseppe Ferrari), and in humanistic studies (here we can observe Enlightenment themes and materialistic elements persisting in the philological study of Antiquity and the moral reflections of Giacomo Leopardi). In this situation conditioned by static and often oppressive political regimes, Italian intellectuals did not appear to be driven by the same speculative creativity and enthusiasm for novelty as the other more advanced European nations. It is therefore no wonder that in Italy during the first half of the nineteenth century, the historiography of philosophy was heavily dependent on currents from abroad, particularly France, even though many raised their voices to demand a “national path” to philosophy. Translations of French and German general histories of philosophy were a constant element that compensated for the lack of works in Italian. Further on we shall examine the translation of Tennemann’s famous textbook more in detail; for the moment, let us mention some other general histories of philosophy which were translated into Italian: the Auszug des Wissenswürdigsten aus der Geschichte der Philosophie (Vienna, 1836) by Johann Peithner Ritter von Lichtenfels (translated as Compendio delle cose più degne a sapersi della storia della filosofia, ed. by D. Meschinelli, Vicenza, 1846) and the Abriss der Geschichte der Philosophie (Leipzig, 1837) by K.F.L. Kannegieszer (translated as Compendio della storia della filosofia, ed. by F. Bertinaria, Turin, 1843, Naples, 1854, with notes by F. Prudenzano). Giovanni Battista Passerini himself translated the Umrisse zur Geschichte der Philosophie (Berlin, 1839) by the Schellingian Eduard Schmidt, to which he added an interesting preface which he pointed out the advances made by the historiography of philosophy in Germany (Delineazione della storia della filosofia, Capolago, 1844). In 1840, again in Capolago, Passerini published a translation of Hegel’s Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Geschichte, following the edition provided by Eduard Gans.