Background
Lombardi, Franco was born on June 28, 1906 in Naples.
Lombardi, Franco was born on June 28, 1906 in Naples.
Having worked clandestinely for the Italian Socialist Party, Lombardi joined the staff of the University of Rome in 1943, and became Professor of Theoretical Philosophy there in 1949. Founder and editor of the journal De homine from 1962.
In Lombardi’s view absolute idealism involves a false epistemology. Such a view includes the thesis that knowledge is the intellectual intuition of an independent reality. To attain such knowledge is to share god’s view of the world, and presuppose that a purely impersonal contemplative, neutral and rational mode of thought is possible. Lombardi objects that there is no absolute thought, only an individual who thinks, placed in a given situation which requires action and decision. Only when viewed from this personalist perspective does the real nature of human freedom become clear: it is a freedom which weighs on us because it involves our accepting responsibility for our own investigations into truth and for the decisions based on them. Freedom understood in this sense is an important element in what Lombardi calls ‘modernity’, a notion to which he has devoted a good deal of attention. The contrary notion to the modem, in Lombardi's analysis, is not the ancient but the medieval, which last he epitomizes as involving a negative attitude to the world and the flesh, and devoted to salvation in the next life. By contrast, modernity involves: a positive attitude to the world and to the scientific investigation of it; a belief in progress; toleration; democracy and the ultimate collapse of national boundaries. The ethic which is consonant with this set of beliefs, unsurprisingly, has strong existentialist elements: the sense of burdensome freedom and responsibility already referred to; belief in the value of individuals and so egalitarianism, with selfrealization as the ultimate goal.