Background
Mazzantini, Carlo was born in 1895 in Reconquista, Argentina.
Mazzantini, Carlo was born in 1895 in Reconquista, Argentina.
Studied in Turin.
Universities of Cagliari (1942-1949), Genoa (194959) and Turin.
Mazzantini himself epitomized the main debt and direction of his philosophy in the remark: ‘Nessuna salvezza per la filosofía, fuori della tradizione ellenica e scolastica'. There is a philosophic! perennis, and it is embodied in neoscholasticism, the only true heir of Greek thought and catholic scholasticism. Unsurprisingly, then, much of Mazzantini’s philosophy is a version of catholic spiritualism cast in neoscholastic categories. For example, his proof of the immortality of the soul relics on the act—potency distinction: the soul is the form of the body. Because it is capable of action, the soul can exist without the material body, and so is by nature immortal. The Hellenic value placed on harmony informs Mazzantini’s criticisms of other schools, notably Hegelian idealism, which preclude the harmonizing of contraries. Mazzantini departed from ‘orthodox’ neoscholasticism in a number of respects, but most notably in his sympathy for Heideggerian thought, and his preoccupation with time and its centrality to human experience. He analyses the present as a synthesis of the temporal and the eternal, this present being not merely a temporal point but an ‘authentic present’. This present is real in virtue of the eternity derived from infinite eternity without which there would be neither time nor times.