Giuseppe Allievo. — Philosopher and pedagogist, born at S. Germano, a hamlet of Vercelli, on 14 Sept. 1830, died at Turin on 24 June 1913. He completed his secondary studies at Vercelli, where among his teachers was the archaeologist P. L. Bruzza of the Barnabites. In 1853 he obtained the degree in philosophy at the University of Turin. At Domodossola, where he taught the following year, he met Rosmini, who had already praised one of his early works. He held various posts from ministers of public instruction, including Mamiani, Berti, and De Sanctis. In 1867 he was entrusted with the teaching of anthropology and pedagogy at the University of Turin, and in 1878 he became full professor of pedagogy there, holding the chair until his death.
His earliest works were metaphysical in character; in his later ones he dealt mainly with problems of anthropology and pedagogy, always opposing absolute idealism and positivism, adhering to the creationist solution and to the principle of personality, according to which the human person is defined as a mind animating an organism.
From his anthropological doctrine the author 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 dual reality, spiritual and corporeal, is divided into psychology and physiology, so pedagogy lays down the laws of education for both spiritual powers and bodily activities. Starting then from the concept that the self is the primordial cell of society, he takes his stand against every form of that pedagogical statolatry which leads to the dissolution of the individual in social relations, and maintaining that the true creator of the State is the family, he concludes that by nature it has the right to educate.
The principal works and most significant writings of the author 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); Metaphysica et psychologica 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).