Luigi Pareyson

Luigi Pareysón (4 February 1918 – 8 September 1991)[1] was an Italian philosopher, best known for challenging the positivist and idealist aesthetics of Benedetto Croce in his 1954 monograph, Estetica.

As a professor at the University of Turin, he had many famous students, including Mario Perniola, Gianni Vattimo, Umberto Eco, and Valerio Verra who studied with Hans-Georg Gadamer in Germany and diffused his thought in Italy.

In 1971 Pareyson published Verità ed interpretazione (Truth and interpretation), his fundamental text which two years later was followed by Verra's monography Ontologia e ermeneutica in Germania (Ontology and hermeneutics in Germany).

In this regard, he argued that “the authentic existentialists, the only ones truly worthy of the name, Heidegger, Jaspers and Marcel, have either referred back to Schelling or intended to come to terms with him.”[4] For Pareyson, German existentialism had to be taken up in a hermeneutic key: he considered truth not an objective datum, as it is in science, but as an interpretation of the individual, which requires subjective responsibility.

He called his position “ontological personalism.”[5] In his historiographical research, Pareyson identifies two currents in post-Hegelian German philosophy, which could be traced back to Søren Kierkegaard and Ludwig Feuerbach, respectively, and which would result in existentialism and Marxism, respectively.