Guido Morpurgo-Tagliabue
Guido Morpurgo-Tagliabue (9 January 1907 – 29 March 1997) was an Italian philosopher, literary critic and academic.
Biography
Born from an unknown father and from the young Giovanna Tagliabue, then wife of the mature lawyer, councillor and philanthropist Gerolamo Morpurgo (1847–1920), he studied at the University of Milan, graduating in Philosophy. After several collaborations to magazines as literary and theatrical critic, he dealt himself with philosophy starting from two essays of the post-war period, Le strutture del trascendentale and Il concetto dello stile (both published in 1951), which gave him the position of professor of Aesthetics at the University of Milan (until 1961), then that of Theoretical Philosophy at the University of Trieste (from 1964 to 1982).
Previously he had collaborated from 1931 to 1938 to the magazine Il Convegno, but he also wrote on La Lettura and La Rassegna d'Italia, and later on Rivista critica di storia della filosofia, Rivista di filosofia, Belfagor, Giornale critico della filosofia italiana, Rivista di estetica, Il pensiero, Aretusa, Lingua e stile, Studi di estetica, Studi tedeschi, etc.
He dealt with germanistics, gnoseology, semantics, aesthetics and poetics, through numerous essays of phenomenological persuasion.
As for Adelchi Baratono and Antonio Banfi, his analysis of the aesthetics and of the poetic and stylistic choices of the artists is detached from the approach of Benedetto Croce and Guido Calogero to move towards the practical aspect (also influenced by the positive existentialism of Nicola Abbagnano) of making art, which can not be reduced to the mere knowledge, and is strongly linked to the technique, also understood as a manual gesture and mechanical, and style, understood as the relationship between the formal elements and those content of the work (home, moreover, of unity in the relationship between perception and imagination).
In 1960 his studies are resumed and arranged in L'esthétique contemporaine, published in French and translated into several languages. Here he organizes the artist's theories and aesthetic doctrines not so much in a chronological sense, but by types: vitalistic aesthetics, psychologistic, formalistic, phenomenological, etc.
He has also dealt with the aesthetics of the eighteenth century, the pre-critical writings of Kant, the controversy Nietzsche-Wagner, Goethe, Musil, Roth, and Kafka.
He was critical of the student protest of 1968, yet he did not avoid confrontation with the movement. A serious illness took away the use of his voice, but he continued to lecture with the help of a voice synthesizer.
He died without children and without ever having married at 90 years of age.
In his memory his sister Ernesta opened a foundation and a prize for philosophy studies in Trieste.
Works
- I processi di Galileo e l'epistemologia (1947; 1963; 1981)
- Il concetto dello stile. Saggio di una fenomenologia dell'arte (1951)
- Le strutture del trascendentale. Piccola inchiesta sul pensiero critico, dialettico, esistenziale (1951)
- Dai romantici a noi (1953)
- Aristotelismo e barocco (1955)
- L'esthétique contemporaine. Une enquête (1960)
- Il concetto del "gusto" nell'Italia del Settecento (1962)
- Linguistica e stilistica di Aristotele (1967)
- Fenomenologia dei giudizi di valore (1973)
- La semantica e i suoi problemi (1974)
- Demetrio, dello stile (1980)
- La nevrosi austriaca. Saggi sul romanzo (1983)
- Nietzsche contro Wagner (1984)
- Geologia letteraria (1986)
- Anatomia del barocco (1987)
- Goethe e il romanzo (1991)
- Il gusto nell'estetica del Settecento (2002; edited by Luigi Russo & Giuseppe Sertoli)
