Antonio Aliotta

Background

Antonio Aliotta was born on January 18, 1881, in Palermo, Italy.

Education

Antonio Aliotta studied philosophy at the University of Florence where he received a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1903.

Career

Antonio Aliotta started his career as a professor of Theoretical Philosophy at the University of Padua in 1913. He held this post until 1919 and then became a professor at the University of Naples Federico II where he worked until 1951. Among his students were Nicola Abbagnano, Paolo Filiasi Carcano and Cleto Carbonara. Aliotta published his first book Classici del pensiero in 1911. Later he wrote such books as La reazione idealistica contro la scienza, Il sacrificio come significato del mondo, Critica dell'esistenzialismo and L'estetica di Croce e la crisi dell'idealismo italiano.

Achievements

• Antonio Aliotta was an Italian philosopher, educator, and writer who was famous for his books about European philosophy. His most famous book is The Idealistic Reaction Against Science that won the Paladin prize in 1912.

Works

More photos

• book

  • The Idealistic Reaction Against Science 1912

Views

Antonio Aliotta believed that the only method that allows the search for truth is an experiment. By "experiment," Aliotta does not mean simply the techniques of the laboratory but any kind of trial-and-error procedure in any field of human activity. He also said that history is a kind of grand laboratory in which people seek, through conflict, to attain more harmonious forms of life. Aliotta stated that the quest for truth just is the quest for superior harmony.

In his later writings, Aliotta moves towards a spiritualist Christianity in which faith, conceived as a thought in operation, is the foundation of philosophy. Human progress to unity is facilitated by universal postulates assumed in our actions, for example, the postulates that there is a certain constant order in the world and that there is a plurality of persons.

Membership

Antonio Aliotta was a member of the Lincean Academy and the Accademia Pontaniana.

Connections

Student:

Nicola Abbagnano

References

• Biographical Dictionary of Twentieth-Century Philosophers This Biographical Dictionary provides detailed accounts of the lives, works, influence and reception of thinkers from all the major philosophical schools and traditions of the twentieth-century. This unique volume covers the lives and careers of thinkers from all areas of philosophy - from analytic philosophy to Zen and from formal logic to aesthetics.
  1996
• In Itinere: European Cities and the Birth of Modern Scientific Philosophy The volume describes a virtual tour of the cities in which Franz Brentano and his pupils worked and lived, with a reconstruction of the intellectual climate of their time. After the Introduction, the intellectual life of Würzburg, Munich, Vienna, Prag, Lvov, Warsaw, Cambridge, Florence and Milan is presented and analyzed.
  1997