Emanuele Severino 1929 – 2020

Emanuele Severino was an Italian philosopher and one of the most controversial and original metaphysicians of the late twentieth century. A pupil of Gustavo Bontadini and long-time professor at Brescia and Venice, he developed in his Returning to Parmenides and the magisterial The Essence of Nihilism the radical thesis that becoming, the passage from being to non-being and back, is impossible, and that the conviction that things truly come to be and pass away is the deepest error and the secret nihilism of Western thought. His theses led to his expulsion from the Catholic University of Milan in the 1970s but have continued to shape Italian philosophical debate.

Emanuele Severino was born at Brescia in February 1929. He took his doctorate at the University of Pavia in 1950 under Gustavo Bontadini with a thesis on Heidegger and the problem of metaphysics, habilitated the next year, and from 1954 taught at the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart in Milan. After his 1964 essay 'Ritornare a Parmenide' the Holy Office in 1969 declared his teaching incompatible with Catholic doctrine; he moved to the new University of Venice — Ca' Foscari, where he held the chair of theoretical philosophy until his retirement.

His major works are La struttura originaria (1958), Studi di filosofia della prassi (1962), Essenza del nichilismo (1972), Gli abitatori del tempo (1978), Destino della necessità (1980), La gloria (2001), Tautotes (1995), the monumental Opere series at Adelphi, and the late dialogues Pensieri sul cristianesimo (1995) and La potenza dell'errare (2013).

Severino reread Parmenides as the deepest truth of Western thought and argued that all subsequent philosophy from Plato to Heidegger has been 'nihilism' because it conceives beings as moving in and out of nothingness; on his austere ontology every being is eternal, and what we call birth and death are only the appearing and disappearing of the everlasting essents. He died in Brescia in January 2020.