Background
Tarozzi, Guiseppe was born on March 24, 1866 in Turin.
Tarozzi, Guiseppe was born on March 24, 1866 in Turin.
University of Padua.
1902-1906, Professor of Philosophy, University of Palermo. 1906-1936. Professor of Philosophy, University of Bologna.
Tarozzi is remembered for simultaneously defending positivism and rejecting determinism. He insisted that a close inspection of the facts of experience revealed that every fact is singular and therefore unrepeatable. Causality, whether universal or otherwise, is a notion whose intelligibility presupposes that the singularity of facts is ignored in favour of their membership of classes: causal laws represent the behaviour of these classes. While this is a methodological necessity for the sciences, reality itself need not be thought of as deterministic. Tarozzi thus exploits the positivist emphasis on the facts of experience in his rejection of the determinism which is often associated with positivism. At the beginning of the century idealism became the dominant philosophy in Italy, and Tarozzi is regarded as the last Italian positivist of note.