Nicola Abbagnano Quotes on Life
Nicola Abbagnano’s Existentialism as Possibility (Esistenzialismo positivo, 1948) and the four-volume Storia della filosofia gave mid-twentieth-century Italian philosophy its most distinctive synthesis of the existential tradition. The central project, presented as a positive alternative to the prevailing Heideggerian, Sartrean, and Jasperian frameworks, treats human existence as a structure of genuine open possibility — neither the necessitarian outcome of social and biological conditions nor the unconditional freedom of pure self-positing — and the corresponding ethical task as the responsible cultivation of those possibilities that authentically belong to one’s situation. The framework, integrating American pragmatism with the European existential tradition, shaped Italian secular philosophy through Norberto Bobbio and the broader postwar Italian reception of Anglo-American thought.
Quotes
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Attributed to Nicola Abbagnano:
“Existence is possibility, not necessity.”
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Attributed to Nicola Abbagnano:
“Positive existentialism finds the openness of being a ground for hope, not despair.”
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Attributed to Nicola Abbagnano:
“Philosophy is the conscious life of the human in question.”
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Attributed to Nicola Abbagnano:
“What is possible for me defines what I am.”
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Attributed to Nicola Abbagnano:
“Every existence projects itself toward what it is not yet.”
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“Existence appears as an “ex-sistere” from nothingness.”
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“From La struttura dell'esistenza (“The Structure of Existence”).”
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“Truth is precisely the abstract and symbolic expression of a given moment in life; and just as this is never equal to itself but transforms into a motion that has no rest, so too does its correlative aspect change according to its rhythm.”
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