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 intellect, with philosophers such as Giambattista Vico (widely regarded as the founder of modern Italian philosophy) 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 (whose main philosopher was Vincenzo Gioberti), 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 Italian 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" (aletheia, ἀλήθεια), and a latter section known as "The Way of Appearance/Opinion" (doxa, δόξα).
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 (as a whole) "On Nature".Simon Trépanier, (2004), Empedocles: An Interpretation, Routledge.
Gorgias, along with Protagoras, forms the first generation of Sophists. "Like other Sophists, he was an itinerant who practised in various cities and gave public exhibitions of his skill at the great pan-Hellenic centres 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."W. K. C. Guthrie, The Sophists (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1971), p. 270. He has been called "Gorgias the Nihilist" although the degree to which this epithet adequately describes his philosophy is controversial.Rosenkrantz, G. (2002). The Possibility of Metaphysics: Substance, Identity, and Time*. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 64(3), 728–736.Gronbeck, B. E. (1972). Gorgias on rhetoric and poetry: A rehabilitation. Southern Journal of Communication, 38(1), 27–38.Caston, V. (2002). Gorgias on Thought and its Objects. Presocratic philosophy: Essays in honor of Alexander Mourelatos.
Ancient Rome
Ancient Roman philosophy 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 (106–43 BC), Lucretius (94–55 BC), Seneca (4 BC – 65 AD), Musonius Rufus (30 AD – 100 AD), Plutarch (45–120 AD), Epictetus (55–135 AD), Marcus Aurelius (121–180 AD), Clement of Alexandria (150–215 AD), Alcinous (2nd century AD), Sextus Empiricus (3rd century AD), Alexander of Aphrodisias (3rd century AD), Ammonius Saccas (3rd century AD), Plotinus (205–270 AD), Porphyry (232–304 AD), Iamblichus (242–327 AD), Themistius (317–388 AD), Augustine of Hippo (354–430 AD), Proclus (411–485 AD), Philoponus of Alexandria (490–570 AD), Damascius (462–540 AD), Boethius (472–524 AD), and Simplicius of Cilicia (490–560 AD).
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 (Four Books of Sentences, 1155–7), 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 (and minor) 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 (Magna glossatura).
Almost contemporary to Peter Lombard was the influential mystic theologian Joachim of Fiore (c. 1132-1202). At first a Cistercian, in the early 1190s, he founded a new congregation, the Florenses, whose centre was the San Giovanni in Fiore Abbey, near Cosenza. Monk, exegete, and religious reformer, Joachim of Fiore stands among the most original and sophisticated apocalyptic thinkers of the Middle Ages. Over the course of his career, he composed a number of major and minor works challenging the normative Augustinian position that God's plan for history after the Bible could not be known, above all concerning the course of future events.
Joachim held a Trinitarian conception of history, which he divided into three ages (status): the age of the Father, in the Old Testament; the age of the Son, the period of the Church; and the shortly-to-be-inaugurated age of the Spirit. The age of the Father, corresponding to the Old Testament, was characterized by strict obedience to God's law and fear, represented by the condition of servants. The age of the Son, spanning from the advent of Christ up to Joachim's days, represented the era of the Church. It was a time of filial obedience and faith, where humanity lived as sons of God. The age of the Holy Spirit was the final age of history. It was to be characterized by complete spiritual freedom, universal love, and deep contemplation. In this era, the formal Church hierarchy was expected to give way to a new Spiritual Church.
Joachim's views were influential among the new orders of the 13th century, especially the Spiritual Franciscans. Scholars like Oswald Spengler, Henri de Lubac and Eric Voegelin note that Joachim's theological model of a progressive, three-stage movement toward a spiritual culmination laid the conceptual groundwork for modern philosophies of history, most notably Hegelian historicism.