BUZZETTI, VINCENZO. — The first and principal promoter, at the beginning of the last century, of the revival of Thomistic philosophy in Italy. Born at Piacenza on 26 March 1777, after devoting his entire life to teaching philosophy and theology in his native city, he died there, a canon of the Cathedral, on 24 December 1824.
During the period of his intellectual formation he lived in the atmosphere of the sensist philosophy which, under the name of Locke, held sway even in the Italian ecclesiastical schools. But from one of his teachers, the Jesuit Baldassare Mazdeu, he learned, together with a sense of dissatisfaction with sensism, a lively love of scholastic philosophy, and through the works of the Dominicans Roselli and Goudin he came into contact with the most genuine doctrines of St. Thomas; he later had as his disciples the brothers Serafino and Domenico Sordi, both of whom became Jesuits and effectively propagated their teacher’s enthusiasm for Thomism. His principal merit was having restored the value of certain characteristic doctrines of the philosophy of St. Thomas, such as the hylomorphic composition of bodies, the substantial union of the human soul with the body, and the real distinction between essence and existence, while also criticizing certain doctrines that at the time enjoyed the approval of many, such as atomism and dynamism in cosmology, occasionalism, pre-established harmony, and physical influx in psychology and natural theology.
Through the Sordi brothers he exerted his influence on Taparelli and Liberatore, who definitively impressed the mark of Thomism upon the revival of scholastic philosophy in the nineteenth century.