Background
Papini, Giovanno was born on January 9, 1881 in Florence.
James and F C S Schiller Pragmatist and literary figure Infls: Nietszche Bergson
Papini, Giovanno was born on January 9, 1881 in Florence.
Editor of various reviews, including Leonardo, La Voce. L'Anima, Lacoba, La Rinasala.
Papini was a leading figure in the Italian reaction against positivism at the beginning of the century. He and others founded a nonconformist review in which the advocacy of pragmatism was intermingled with a broad reformist programme in both politics and religion. Pragmatism was associated with liberation from the orthodoxies which then prevailed in the Italian academic world. Papini was a pluralist, allowing value to metaphysics but rejecting the notion of absolute metaphysical truth. In later life his interests turned increasingly in the direction of religion. Compared with Giovanni Vailati or Mario Calderoni, Papini does not emerge as the most rigorous or philosophically interesting of the Italian pragmatists. Nor did pragmatism, opposed by the Church and, later, by the idealists Croce and Gentile, really put down roots in Italy. However, in large measure due to the influence of Papini, it was of some importance in the period prior to the First World War.