Buzzetti, Vincenzo

BUZZETTI, VINCENZO. - 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 having devoted his whole life to the teaching of philosophy and theology in his native city, he died there, a canon of the Cathedral, on 24 Dec. 1824.

During the period of his intellectual formation he lived in the atmosphere of sensist philosophy, which under the name of Locke dominated even 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 in the works of the Dominicans Roselli and Goudin he came into contact with the most genuine doctrines of St. Thomas; he later had as disciples the brothers Serafino and Domenico Sordi, who, having both become Jesuits, effectively propagated their teacher's enthusiasm for Thomism. His principal merit was that he restored value to certain doctrines characteristic 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, and that he at the same time criticized certain doctrines which then won the approval of many, such as atomism and dynamism in cosmology, occasionalism, pre-established harmony and physical influx in psychology and in natural theology.

Through the Sordi brothers he exercised his influence on Taparelli and on Liberatore, who definitively impressed the stamp of Thomism on the revival of scholastic philosophy in the 19th century.

Carlo Giacom