Background
Pastore, Valentino Annibale was born on November 13, 1868 in Orbassano, Turin.
Pastore, Valentino Annibale was born on November 13, 1868 in Orbassano, Turin.
Professor of Theoretical Philosophy, University of Turin.
The first, and for many years the only, Italian philosopher to wrestle with modern science and its philosophy, Pastore’s work is characterized by a deep knowledge of developments in mathematics and science in the twentieth century and displays a mastery of its language and concepts. He opened Italian philosophy to a whole new range of problems: to the most advanced analyses of the concept of number and the foundations of geometry; to Russell's amalgamation of logic and mathematics; and to the theory of relativity and the new advances made in physics by Einstein. Schrôdinger. Heisenberg and Bohr. For Pastore epistemology, the theory of knowledge, is, in its strictest sense, the theory of science and the problem of scientific method, a problem to which much of his writing is devoted, and a problem of immediate significance in the Italy of his day which had witnessed a surge of irrationalism and of antiscientific and antipositivist sentiment. After 1922, while still dealing with scientific knowledge, Pastore came to a conception of philosophy as the study of pure thought, a 'general logic’ whose basis lies outside particular logical systems, and with Geymonat undertook the search for the process of construction of the most elementary forms of thinking. This involved a somewhat obscure distinction between logic as logicality and logic as a particular system in which there is talk of a ‘logical intuition of the universe’. His sense of mystery was further to motivate his study of existentialism and historical materialism.