Background
Varisco, Bernardino was born on April 20, 1850 in Chiara, Brescia, Italy.
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Bernardino Varisco
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Professor of Theoretical Philosophy, University of Rome, 1906-1925.
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Varisco is a philosopher whose work falls into two stages, the positivistic and the metaphysical. The first phase begins with the primary, given fact of a multiplicity of conscious subjects, each, in the style of Leibniz, with its own perspective on the world. Conscious life shades off in unbroken gradations into unconscious life and into the inanimate, the assertion of such an unbroken gradation manifesting a commitment to an equally Leibnizian panpsychism. Varisco’s move to the University of Rome in 1906 saw the start of his new. metaphysical directions of thought which sought to reconcile the scientific and religious ways of understanding. His problem, to which his answer is decidedly obscure, is how to move from the set of assertions about the plurality of subjects so categorically affirmed in his first stage of philosophy, to assertions about the unitary reality of the universe which he seems to suppose to be required in religion. The answer appears to be an appeal to something called ‘being’, which is present in every individual act of thought by which objects are apprehended by subjects. This Being is then identified with a universal subject which is thinking itself in all particular subjects and in all the particular objects of the world. Being thus conceived is, as he admits, a somewhat abstract notion which falls short of most people’s understanding of a personal God. At the final stage of his life’s work he arrives at a more full-blown theism, arguing that God limits himself in the act of creating men who can freely cooperate creatively with him. He believes this to be not merely a view supportive of a religious attitude to life but one that is especially congenial to Christianity.
