VINCENZO BUZZETTI. — First and foremost promoter, at the beginning of the last century, of the revival of Thomistic philosophy in Italy. Born in Piacenza on 26 March 1777, after dedicating his entire life to teaching philosophy and theology in his native city, he died there, as canon of the Cathedral, on 24 December 1824.
During the period of his intellectual formation, he lived in the atmosphere of sensist philosophy, which, under the banner of Locke, still dominated even the ecclesiastical schools of Italy. But from one of his teachers, the Jesuit Baldassare Mazdeu, he acquired, with a sense of dissatisfaction toward sensism, a lively love for 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 disciples the brothers Serafino and Domenico Sordi, who, both becoming Jesuits, effectively propagated their master’s enthusiasm for Thomism. His principal merit was that of having revalorized certain characteristic doctrines of the philosophy of St. Thomas, such as the hylemorphic composition of bodies, the substantial union of the human soul with the body, and the real distinction between essence and existence, while at the same time criticizing some doctrines that then enjoyed the approval of many, such as atomism and dynamism in cosmology, occasionalism, pre-established harmony, and physical influence in psychology and natural theology.
Through the Sordi brothers, he exercised his influence on Taparelli and Liberatore, who definitively impressed the stamp of Thomism upon the revival of Scholastic philosophy in the 19th century.