ANGIULI, ANDREA. - Pedagogue, born in Castellana (Bari) in 1837, died in Rome in 1890, is a well-known representative of Italian positivist pedagogy. In 1862 he went to Germany to perfect his philosophical studies, remaining there for more than three years; then he visited Paris and London. Upon his return to Italy, he first taught at the Vittorio Emanuele lyceum in Naples, then pedagogy at the University of Bologna. In 1876 he moved to Naples, where he took up the teaching of pedagogy at that university.
The author bases the pedagogical problem in science and identifies it with the problem of social progress. For him, science must dethrone every religion, every dogma, every metaphysics. The constitution of society can only come from science, which is the new providence, the power and foresight of society. This is the program of modern democracy; indeed, modern democracy is born of this program. For the author, science is positive philosophy, which represents the totality of the sciences and, like all sciences, must adhere to experience. There are no a priori knowledges for the author, and in his work *La filosofia e la scienza positiva* (1868) he can affirm that the spirit, which is the metaphysical absolute, is not a result of critique and scientific research, but a hypothesis, a fantastic production. Scientific investigation is sought as positive and historical, and philosophy too is research and not dogma, experimental and not metaphysical, a posteriori and not a priori. Thus philosophy is reconnected to our civil tradition, whose course Catholics and theologians such as Rosmini and Gioberti have broken; therefore, to return to the great current of culture it is necessary to remake national consciousness “with a free school and a free philosophy.” But the social organism cannot be reconstituted without reconstituting the individuals who compose II. Now, the education that must provide for the reconstitution of individuals is at once physical and intellectual, moral and aesthetic, civil and religious. This education, however, is not the result of a moment of the human spirit, but the fruit of a progressive evolution. Religion and experience, the pagan world and the Christian world, positive science and abstraction are opposing directions that, coexisting within the sphere of education, clash and contradict each other, thus arresting every possibility of impulse and development. It is therefore necessary to restore unity to the mind and direct the life of individuals toward determined ends; and this can only be done by science, which, in the author’s conception, takes on the aspect of a new religion. And since the modern State does not remain indifferent or extraneous to the formation of its citizens, it has the task of realizing this scientific unity of minds.
Having affirmed the principle of science as the unifier and regulator of minds, the author, in the exigency of proclaiming the secularity of the school, denies to it, in the name of a truth he calls objective because it is born of science, the teaching of religion, which, far from lacking in the school, would remain there as a primitive and original foundation, disclosed in a purer form; indeed, there would remain the sovereign law of cosmic order without caprices or pardons, and the feeling of our dependence would rise “to a greater mental height.” Where one cannot fail to perceive the coldness of a religion that is no longer feeling, no longer the movement of interior conscience, and thus no longer impulse and yearning, but cold and passive nature. Firm now in the principle that science and culture, in their known progressive course, are, one might say, the new religion, the author wants children to be educated in contact with concrete and sensible facts; therefore mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, mechanics are the disciplines they must embrace, closing their eyes to that mythical and fantastic world in which, deep down, only childhood can live and does live. The new myth, science, is not the domain of the school alone; it must also penetrate the family, for only in this way can the people free themselves from the prejudices that darken them and become free. The author thus falls into that abstraction from which he wished to escape, and stiffens the school into a sterile dogmatism devoid of that spirit and that religious vision which cannot be tampered with without compromising the very foundation of all education.
Studies. - F. Alterocca, *Sulla vita e sulle opere di A. A.*, Milan 1890; F. Orestano, *Angiulli*, Rome 1907; G. Allievo, *Opuscoli pedagogici*, Terni 1909; G. Taurc, *La vita e il pensiero di A. A.*, Rome 1914; G. Giuffrida, *Il fallimento della pedagogia scientifica*, Città di Castello 1920; G. Gentile, *Le origini della filosofia contemporanea in Italia*, II: *I positivi*, Messina 1921; S. Caramella, *Studi sul positivismo pedagogico*, Florence 1921; G. Colozza, s. V. in A. Martinazzoli and L. Credaro, *Dizionario illustrato di pedagogia*, Milan, n.d., pp. 1-55; G. Calò, *L'antisognano del positivismo pedagogico: A. A.* in *Dottrine e Opere*, Lanciano 1932.