Nicola Abbagnano 1901 – 1990

Nicola Abbagnano was an Italian philosopher and the principal architect of what he called positive existentialism. After early work in Naples and many years as professor at Turin, he developed a philosophy that took existence as irreducibly possibility rather than necessity and the openness of being as a ground for hope rather than for despair. His Philosophical Dictionary became the standard Italian reference work in philosophy, while his Outline of the History of Philosophy shaped Italian philosophical education for decades. He was a prolific journalist and newspaper columnist who carried philosophy into the wider Italian public sphere.

Nicola Abbagnano was born at Salerno in southern Italy in July 1901. He took his doctorate at the University of Naples in 1922 under Antonio Aliotta, taught for fourteen years in Italian liceos, and in 1936 was appointed to the chair of history of philosophy at Turin, where in 1946 he moved to the chair of philosophy and remained until his retirement in 1972. With Norberto Bobbio he founded the Rivista di filosofia, and with Ludovico Geymonat the Italian Centre for Methodological Studies.

His major works are La struttura dell'esistenza (1939), Introduzione all'esistenzialismo (1942), Filosofia, religione, scienza (1947), Possibilità e libertà (1956), the three-volume Storia della filosofia (1946–1950), the Dizionario di filosofia (1961, long the standard Italian reference work), and the late autobiographical Ricordi di un filosofo (1990).

Abbagnano formulated what he called a 'positive existentialism' against the predominantly negative existentialisms of Heidegger and Sartre: the human condition is a structure of genuine possibility and ineliminable risk, but the openness of the future is to be embraced rather than mourned, and freedom is exercised by the constructive choice of concrete possibilities. He died at Milan in September 1990.