Alessandro CHIAPPELLI. — Philosopher, born in Pistoia on 20 Nov. 1857, professor in Naples from 1887 to 1908, died there in 1931. A Neo-Kantian, he was freer than others in his school from positivist influences, pro-modernist, and inclined toward idealism.
According to C., reality is a system of relations. The reality of individual beings is given by their variable participation in the totality of relations. Thought is the unifying form of relations. Divine thought, by positing relations, posits beings; human thought, by reflecting, reposits them epistemologically. God thus founds 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 the real to rise to higher forms; a tendency that gives rise to value—a problem much felt and studied by C. C.’s thought may be classified as a positivist-idealist-theistic eclecticism.