Background
Mondolfo, Rodolpho was born in 1877 in Senigallia.
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Rodolpho Mondolfo
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Education
University of Florence. Infla: Zeller.
Career
Professor of the History of Philosophy, urin (1910-1914) and Bologna (1914-1938). Emigrated to Argentina, 1938. Professor at Córdoba and Tucumán.
Received many academic honours.
f 1903-1904) Saggi per la sioria délia morale utilitaria, 2 Vols.
Views
One of the most revered of historians of philosophy in Italy and Latin America, Mondolfo maintained a prolific output during most of his long life. Three areas of thought occupied most of his work: the philosophy of ancient Greece; European thought from Hobbes to Condillac; and Marxism. Of these, his work on the first is generally held to be of the greatest importance. A principal aim of his st udies of ancient philosophy is to combat the view that the Greeks conceived the universe as static and finite, and so he sought to emphasize notions of dynamism, infinity and subjectivity in the ideas of the thinkers concerned. In his works on Marxism, there is a complementary stress on the dynamic, non-determinist elements he finds in this philosophy. A number of general convictions underlie Mondolfo’s work. First, no philosophy, whatever its pretensions to the contrary, is independent of its milieu and every system is composed of beliefs which are sub specie temporis. Second, there is always and inevitably a subjective element in the writing of the history of philosophy, since the individual historian must attempt to relive the philosophical experience of the past. Third and importantly, Mondolfo docs not accept that these two convictions entail any form of self-refuting subjectivism. There is, he argues, an element of progress in the history of philosophy, a gradual refining and clarification of the problems concerned. This he equates with what he calls ‘a progressive deepening of philosophical consciousness’.
