Abstract

Which role has played Luigi Pareyson’s Aesthetics in Italian Philosophy of the twentieth Century? This paper tries an answer to this question by saying that Estetica. Teoria della formatività represents the first systematic aesthetic treatise written in Italy from an utterly non-crocean point of view. Indeed, after the second world war many philosophers in Italy tried to elaborate an aesthetic theory which could replace Croce’s philosophy of Art, that dominated the scene during the entire first half of the century. But no one succeeded in creating a systematic aesthetics, embracing all the principal problems of the field; while those who wrote a systematic aesthetic theory in the fourties and fifties, like Cesare Brandi or Guido Calogero where not so completely independent from Croce’s philosophy. The first part of the paper gives an account of the main differences between Pareyson’s and Croce’s views on Aesthetics, concerning the nature of the aesthetic activity, the role of feelings in art, the function of interpretation, the relationships between aesthetics and poetics. The second part is devoted to the influence of Pareyson’s Aesthetics on Italian philosophy of the second half of the century, and it shows how, the great success of hermeneutics notwithstanding, the importance of Pareyson’s aesthetics was not entirely acknowledged. Nevertheless, some important Italian philosophers of our days, like Umberto Eco and Gianni Vattimo, received weighty suggestions from Pareyson’s theory of art.