ANGIULLI, ANDREA. - Educationalist b. at Castellana (Bari) in 1837, d. at Rome in 1890, is a well-known representative of Italian pedagogical positivism. Having gone to Germany in 1862 to perfect himself in philosophical studies, he remained there for more than a three-year period; then he visited Paris and London. Returning to his homeland, 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 in that university.
A. grounds the pedagogical problem in science and identifies it with the problem of social progress. For him science must detonate every religion, every dogma, every metaphysics. The constitution of society can come only from science, which is « the new providence, power and social foresight ». This is the program of modern democracy, or rather modern democracy is born from this program. Science is for A. positive philosophy, which represents the totality of the sciences and, like all the sciences, must adhere to experience. For A. there are no a priori cognitions, 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 criticism and of scientific research, but a hypothesis, a fantastic production ». Scientific investigation is positive and historical research, and philosophy too is research and not dogma, is experimental and not metaphysical, a posteriori and not a priori. Thus philosophy reattaches itself to our civil tradition, whose course Catholics and theologians such as Rosmini and Gioberti have broken; therefore, in order to re-enter the great current of culture, it is necessary to remake the national conscience « with a free school and with a free philosophy ». But the social organism is not reconstituted without reconstituting the individual persons who compose it. Now the reconstitution of individuals must be provided for by education, which is physical and intellectual together, moral and aesthetic, civil and religious. This education, however, is not the result of a single moment of the human spirit, but is the fruit of a progressive evolution. Religion and experience, the pagan world and the Christian world, positive science and abstractism are opposing tendencies which, coexisting within the sphere of education, clash and contradict each other, thus halting every possibility of impulse and development. It is therefore necessary to restore unity to the mind and to direct the life of individuals toward determinate goals; this can be done only by science, which in A.'s conception takes on the aspect of a new religion. And since the modern State does not remain indifferent or extraneous before the formation of citizens, it has the task of bringing about this scientific unity of minds.
Having affirmed the principle of science as unifier and regulator of minds, A., in the demand to proclaim the secular character of the school, denies to it, in the name of truths that he calls objective, only because they are born of science, religious instruction, which, far from being absent from the school, would remain there as a primitive and original foundation, unveiled in a purer form; there would remain indeed « the sovereign law of the cosmic order without whims and without pardons, and the sentiment of our dependence » would raise itself « to a greater mental height ». Here it is impossible not to perceive the coldness of a religion that is no longer sentiment, a movement of the interior conscience, and therefore impulse and yearning, but cold and passive nature. Firm by now in the principle that science and culture, in their progressive motion, are, one may say, the new religion, A. 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 gaze to all that mythical and fantastic world in which, at bottom, childhood alone knows how to live and can live. The new myth, science, is not the domain of the school alone; but it must penetrate families as well, because only in this way can the people clear from themselves the prejudices that obscure them and make themselves free. A. thus fell into that abstractism from which he wished to escape, and stiffened 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.
Bibliography5 works
Studies. - F. Alterocca, Sulla vita e sulle opere di A. A., Milan 1890; F. Orestano, Angiulli, Rome 1907; G. Allievo: Opuscoli pedagogici, Turin 1909; G. Taurè, 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 positivisti, 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. 51-58; G. Calò, L'antessignano del positivismo pedagogico: A. A., in Dottirino e Opere, Lanciano 1932.
Nino Sammartano