Luigi Pareyson 1918 – 1991

Luigi Pareyson was an Italian philosopher of existence, hermeneutics, and aesthetics and the principal architect of Italian personalism in the second half of the twentieth century. Long-time professor at Turin, he taught and shaped a generation of Italian philosophers, including Gianni Vattimo and Umberto Eco. His Existence and Person, Aesthetics: Theory of Formativity, Truth and Interpretation, and the late Ontology of Freedom developed a philosophy in which the person is a unique interpretation of being, art is the formative making of forms, and truth is given only in the singularity of interpretation.

Luigi Pareyson was born at Piasco in Piedmont in February 1918, the son of a Waldensian father and a Catholic mother who raised him in the Roman Church. He took his doctorate at the University of Turin in 1939 with a thesis on Karl Jaspers, taught philosophy in lyceums during the war, and in 1946 was appointed to the chair of aesthetics at Turin, moving to theoretical philosophy in 1952. Among his Turin pupils were Umberto Eco and Gianni Vattimo.

His major books are L'esistenzialismo di Karl Jaspers (1940), Studi sull'esistenzialismo (1943), Esistenza e persona (1950), Estetica: Teoria della formatività (1954), Verità e interpretazione (1971), and the posthumous Ontologia della libertà (1995), assembled from his late writings on Schelling, Dostoevsky, and the problem of evil. He also published influential studies of Fichte and Schelling.

Pareyson developed a 'personalist ontologism' on which every human person interprets the truth from a singular perspective and an aesthetics of formativity in which the work of art is the production of a form that itself reveals how it had to be made; in his late ontology of freedom he argued that being is the eternal contention of good and evil within God himself. He died at Rapallo in September 1991.