CHIAPPELLI, ALESSANDRO. - Philosopher, born at Pistoia on 20 Nov. 1857, professor at Napoli from 1887 to 1908, died there in 1931. A Neo-Kantian, freer than others of the school from positivist influences, sympathetic to Modernism, he inclined toward idealism.
According to C., reality is a system of relations. The reality of individual beings is constituted by their variable participation in the totality of relations. Thought is the form that unifies relations. Divine thought, by positing relations, posits beings; human thought, by reflecting, re-posits them gnoseologically. God thus grounds the dualism of thought and being, and this saves C. from falling into the transcendental creativity of the idealist a priori synthesis. Knowledge reveals the tendency of reality to rise to higher forms; a tendency that gives rise to value, a problem keenly felt and studied by C. C.'s thought may be classified as a positivist-idealist-theistic eclecticism.