Armando Carlini

File:Armando Carlini.jpg

Armando Carlini

Armando Carlini (9 August 1878 – 30 September 1959) was an Italian philosopher. In the 1930s he also served as a deputy of the Kingdom of Italy.

Biography

He was born in Naples, Italy. He graduated in Bologna first in Literature, then in Philosophy under Francesco Acri. After teaching first Italian and then History of Philosophy in high schools in many cities in Italy (Iesi, Foggia, Cesena, Trani, Parma and Pisa), he was called in 1917 to the University of Pisa to replace Giovanni Gentile, who had recently moved to Rome, first as a lecturer, then as holder of the chair of Theoretical Philosophy (1922). A few years later he became rector of the University of Pisa (1927–1935).

Elected deputy (1934–1939), he was admitted, on the eve of World War II (1939), to the Academy of Italy, the highest award granted at the time by the Fascist government of which he was a fervent supporter. After World War II, having retired from public life and teaching, he devoted himself entirely to philosophical and religious studies and the publication of his latest creations.

He died in Pisa, Italy.

Thought

Carlini began to make a name for himself, around 1910, by taking on the direction, first with Renato Serra, then on his own, of a series published by Laterza that was initially launched under the name Testi di filosofia ad uso dei licei and later renamed Piccola biblioteca filosofica. Introducing him to the Laterza publishing company was Giovanni Gentile, whom Carlini had met a few years earlier, and Benedetto Croce, at the time still in contact with Gentile. The series had popular purposes, but it soon became famous for the high level of the authors who collaborated in various ways within it, including, in addition to Carlini, Armando Saitta and Gentile himself. In addition to his work as editor-in-chief and coordinator, the Neapolitan philosopher published in 1912, two essays on Aristotle (actually Aristotelian collections edited, commented and translated by him), which was followed by a study on Giovanni Bovio (1914) that aroused the interest of not a few scholars and the approval of Gentile, considered by Carlini to be his undisputed master.

Already a professor in charge in Pisa for some years, Carlini published in 1921 two full-bodied volumes that secured him a place of absolute prominence in the academic world of the time: The Philosophy of John Locke, an exhaustive study of the great British philosopher's thought, and above all The Life of the Spirit. In the latter essay, in fact, he clearly began to outline his own thought: adherence to the idealist doctrine, seen as a synthesis between Gentile's immanentist thought (Gentile was, until his own death, his friend, as well as his teacher) and that of Croce, suffused, however, with a Christian light that would end up, as the years went by, becoming preponderant and imposing itself more and more clearly in Carlini's speculations.

As early as 1934, with the release of La religiosità dell'arte e della filosofia (The Religiosity of Art and Philosophy) Carlini became an advocate of a Christian spiritualism that distanced him from Gentile and Croce (who though never professed themselves as atheists), bringing him somewhat closer to Rosmini. At the center of his own philosophical vision is Catholic thought of especially Augustinian matrix, which stands as a universal ethical foundation and key to the interpretation of human existence. According to the Neapolitan philosopher, the attainment of Christian truth, centered on a higher entity that transcends us, is, however, attainable only subjectively, through constant rethinking fraught with doubt and anguish. It is from the dialogue we are able to establish with ourselves that we can discover God. The Christian message is therefore not given to us through a form of dogmatic metaphysics, but constitutes the culmination of a critical inner journey, an achievement achievable only through the tools of a critical metaphysics. The centrality of Christianity in the theory of knowledge would be taken up and further developed in the essay Lineages of a Realistic Conception of the Human Spirit, given to print in 1942, and especially in In Search of Myself (1951).

Understandable, therefore, appears the interest that Carlini nurtured for German existentialism, which, however, was expressed with a singular preference toward Martin Heidegger, in whose speculations religious instances found little place, rather than toward the Christian Karl Jaspers, who had structured his own thought on those same instances. In 1952 Armando Carlini translated from German, commented on and edited the Italian edition of Heidegger's What Is Called Thinking?, and the following year, again by the same author, What Is Metaphysics?

Works

• La mente di Giovanni Bovio (1914)
• La filosofia di Giovanni Locke (1921)
• La vita dello spirito (1921)
• La religione nella scuola (1927)
• Aristotle, La Metafisica (1928; 1949; 1959; 1965; translation and notes)
• La religiosità dell'arte e della filosofia (1934)
• "Filosofia e religione nel pensiero di Mussolini," Quaderni dell'Ist. Naz. di Cultura fascista, Ser. 4, No. 5 (1934)
• Il mito del realismo (1936)
• Lineamenti di una concezione realistica dello spirito umano (1942)
• "Saggio sul pensiero filosofico e religioso del Fascismo," Ist. Naz. di Cultura Fascista (1942)
• Il problema di Cartesio (1948)
• Perché credo (1950)
• Cattolicesimo e pensiero moderno (1953)
• Breve storia della filosofia (1957)
• Giovanni Gentile, la vita e il pensiero (1957)
• Le ragioni della fede (1959)

References

• Baring, Edward (2009). Converts to the Real: Catholicism and the Making of Continental Philosophy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• Bugossi, Tomaso (2004). Sciacca e Carlini: un dialogo teoretico. Venezia: Marsilio.
• Del Bello, Claudio (1977). "Carlini, Armando." In: Dizionario biografico degli italiani, 20. Roma: Istituto dell'Enciclopedia Italiana.
• Guzzo, Augusto (1960). Armando Carlini. Torino: Edizioni di Filosofia.
• Messinese, Leonardo (2012). Armando Carlini. Roma: Lateran University Press.
• Messinese, Leonardo (2013). Stanze della metafisica. Heidegger, Löwith, Carlini, Bontadini, Severino. Brescia: Morcelliana.
• Olgiati, Francesco (1933). Neoscolastica, idealismo e spiritualismo. Milano: Vita e pensiero.
• Prini, Pietro (1997). La filosofia cattolica italiana del 900. Roma/Bari: Editori Laterza.
• Rizza, Paolo (1999). Dopo Gentile: problemi ed esiti dell'attualismo in Carlini e Spirito. Roma: Settimo Sigillo.
• Turi, Gabriele (1994). Giovanni Gentile, una biografia. Firenze: Giunti.
• Uscătescu, George (1962). Vico e altre guide. Pisa: Giardini.

External links

• Works by Armando Carlini at Open Library