Background
Colorni, Eugenio was born on April 22, 1909 in Milan.
Colorni, Eugenio was born on April 22, 1909 in Milan.
Born in Milan, Colorni taught philosophy at the University of Trieste, and was active in the anti-fascist Giustizia e Libertà movement. (Hirschmann dedicated his book Exit, Voice, and Loyalty to Colorni"s memory) In 1938 he was arrested for his anti-fascist political activity. He escaped but was killed in Rome by a Nazi ambush in 1944, shortly before the Allies arrived.
The highly original writings of Colomi’s lamentably short life display a capacity for scrupulous analysis. They reject any claim to non-natural suprasensible truths or natural laws pre-existing (he human activity of theory making. His manuscripts show inter alia an interest in anthropomorphism. reification and the distinction between knowing how and knowing that, and the approach has similarities to the operationalism of Bridgman together with a Kantian legacy. The remarks on the logical status of physical constants, such as the speed of light, are said to be especially perspicacious. His work contains a criticism of the idealist philosophy dominant in (he Italy of his time. His studies of Leibniz attempt (o show the coherence of that philospher’s rationalism. There is some attempt to find in Leibniz an account of the struggle of the spirit to liberate itself from the passions of the body, but, it has been argued, this is not to be found in Leibniz’s work, where we find only talk of a struggle between distinct and indistinct ideas, virtue lying in a deepening of understanding. In his last years Corloni assembled the materials for a study of the problem of knowledge in the light of contemporary developments in physics, work which was posthumously published in the journal Sigma as the ‘Critique of philosophy and physics’. A complete collection of his papers is planned.