Education
University of Padua and University of Rome. Infts: Aquinas, Kierkegaard and Heidegger.
University of Padua and University of Rome. Infts: Aquinas, Kierkegaard and Heidegger.
1956-1981, Professor of Philosophy, Catholic University of Milan.
Main publications:
(1939) La nozione metafísica di partecipazione seconda S. Tommasod'Aquino, third edition. Turin: Società éditrice internazionale, 1963.
(1941) Percezione epensiero. second edition. Brescia: Morcelliana, 1961.
(1955) L’anima, Rome: Studium.
(1957) Dali'essere all'esistente. Brescia: Morcelliana. (1964) Introduzione all’ateísmo moderno, Rome: Studium.
(1983) Introduzione a San Tommaso, Milan: Ares.
Secondary literature:
Henle, R. J. ( 1957) A note on certain textual evidence in Fabro’s "La nozione metafísica di partecipazione"’. The Modern Schoolman 34: 265-82.
John, Helen James (1966) ‘Fabro, participation and the act of being’, in The Thomist Spectrum, New York: Fordham University Press, pp. 87-107.
Fabro’s vast output includes many studies of recent and contemporary philosophy, in particular of Kierkegaard, some of whose works he has translated into Italian. As a theoretical philosopher and, in particular, as a Thomist, he has been a central figure in the movement to reinstate the notion of participation in Thomistic metaphysics. The neo-Platonist concept of participation, which lies at the heart of Plotinus's Enneads, was adopted by the Christian Pseudo-Dionysius to describe and explain the relation between God and his creatures.
Thus, all created things were held to participate in being in the sense that being flowed to them from God, and the human intellect, according to Augustine, participated in the light of the divine intellect. Fabro, together with others such as Louis de Raeymaeker. argues that the idea of participation survived the
Aristotelian revival of the thirteenth century, and was employed by Aquinas in his discussion of essence and existence. Essence, taken in itself, is a potency, which is realized when it acquires existence, and this it does by way of participation in the act of being.
It had always been conceded that Aquinas had studied neo-Platonist writings in his early years, for instance in his Commentary on the Divine Names. Fabro argues that this survived into his mature works, which, far from being a mere restatement of Aristotle, represented instead an Aristotelianism corrected by, and synthesized with, Platonic notions of participation. Fabro’s formidable knowledge of contemporary philosophy makes him one of the most striking and accessible of twentieth-century Thomists, and his reputation is generally high.
Sources: Dizionario dei Filosof dei Novecento. Enciclopedia Filosofea. Dizionario generale degli auton italiani conlemporanei.