PASQUALE BORRELLI. — Philosopher, born in Tornareccio (Chieti) on 8 June 1782, died in Naples in 1849. He led 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 to Graz, then to Baden and finally to Vienna. In 1825 he returned to Naples, where he devoted himself primarily to scientific activity until his death.
His works, published under the anagrammatic pseudonym 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 studies in mathematics, medicine, and law, was an empiricist-positivist who barely escaped pure materialism. At the age of twenty-one, in the *Principia zoognosiae* (1803), he argued that life would be an effect of excitability, i.e., an organic force set in motion by stimuli according to a zootimic law. In the *Introduzione*, thought is presented as an action of the soul produced by an occasion or stimulus acting upon the nerves, and in the same way universal ideas would arise. The functions of the spirit are reduced to three: sensation, judgment, and will; however, free will is denied, not as a power of self-determination but as mere immunity from coercion, i.e., mere spontaneity.