Borrelli, Pasquale

BORRELLI, PASQUALE. - Philosopher, b. at Tornareccio (Chieti) on 8 June 1782, d. at Naples in 1849. He had a very eventful and adventurous life. Around the age of forty he was minister of police in the liberal government of 1820. Exiled to Trieste, he later moved on to Graz, then to Baden and finally to Vienna. In 1825 he returned to Naples, where he carried on his activity, predominantly scientific, until his death.

His works, under the anagrammatic pseudonym of Pirro Lallebasque, are: Introduzione alla filosofia naturale del pensiero (Lugano 1824); Principi della genealogia del pensiero (ibid. 1825); both reprinted in a new edition under the title Opere filosofiche (4 vols., ibid. 1839); Principi della scienza etimologica (ibid. 1830).

B., who came to philosophy from the study of mathematics, medicine and law, is an empiricist-positivist who barely saves himself from pure materialism. At the age of twenty-one, in the Principia zoognosiae (1803), he maintains that life would be an effect of excitability, that is, of an organic force set in action by a stimulus according to a zoorhythmic law. In the introduction, thought is presented as an action of the soul produced by an occasion or stimulus acting on the nerves, and in the same way universal ideas would arise. The functions of the spirit are reduced to three: sensation, judgment and will; to this however, free will is denied, which is not so much a power of self-determination, but is reduced to the simple immunitas a coactione, that is, to mere spontaneity.