ALLIEVO, GIUSEPPE. - Philosopher and educationist, b. at S. Germano, a village in the Vercelli area, on 14 Sept. 1830, d. at Turin on 24 June 1913. He completed his secondary studies at Vercelli, where one of his teachers was the archaeologist P. L. Bruzza of the Clerics Regular of St. Paul. In 1853 he obtained his degree in philosophy at the University of Turin. At Domodossola, where he taught the following year, he met Rosmini, who had already praised a youthful work of his. He held various assignments from ministers of Public Education, among them Mamiani, Berti and De Sanctis. In 1867 he was given the post of teaching anthropology and pedagogy at the University of Turin and, in 1878, he became there full professor of pedagogy, holding the chair until his death.
His first works were metaphysical in character; in the later ones he dealt mainly with problems of anthropology and pedagogy, always opposing absolute idealism and positivism, holding firmly to the creationist solution and to the principle of personality, according to which the human person is defined as a mind that animates an organism.
From his anthropological doctrine the A. draws the essential elements of his own system, whose supreme principle is the development of the organic personality of the child. And just as anthropology, recognizing in man a twofold reality, spiritual and corporeal, is divided into psychology and physiology, so pedagogy lays down the laws of the education both of the spiritual powers and of the bodily activities. Starting moreover from the concept that the I is the primordial cell of society, he ranges himself against every form of that pedagogical statolatry which leads to dissolving the individual in social relations, and maintaining that the true creator of the State is the family, he concludes that by nature the right to educate belongs to it.
The principal works and the most significant writings of the A. on metaphysical questions and on problems of philosophy, anthropology and pedagogy are: Saggi filosofici (Milan 1868); L'Hegelianismo, la scienza e la vita (ibid. 1868); Studi pedagogici (Turin 1879); Metaphysicae et psychologicae institutiones (ibid. 1880); L'uomo e il cosmo. Studi antropologici (ibid. 1891); L'educazione di se stesso e la vita interiore (ibid. 1896); Lo spirito e la materia nell'universo: l'anima ed il corpo dell'uomo (in Atti della R. Acc. delle Sc. di Torino, 38 [1903]); Il ritorno alle idee del sapere umano (Turin 1911).
Bibliography4 works
Il problema della coeducazione, Rome 1614: G. Vidari, G. A., Turin 1914: Per il primo centenario della nascita di G. A.: scritti di G. Vidari, A. Maletti, C. Mazzantini, in Rivista Pedagogico, 23 (1930), fasc. 2.
Rosario Guido Tentori