CORNOLDI, GIOVANNI. — Jesuit, one of the principal restorers of Thomism in Italy, born in Venice on 29 September 1822, died in Rome on 18 January 1892.
Disgusted with the philosophical doctrines of his time, including those he had been taught at the Collegio Romano, he turned to Aristotelian-Thomistic philosophy. In one of his early works he criticized the mechanism of Fr. S. Tongiorgi and the dynamism of Fr. A. Secchi, and reasserted the hylomorphic doctrine concerning the constitution of bodies. Having become a writer in 1876 and then rector of La Civiltà Cattolica, he defended ever more openly, together with Taparelli, the most genuine Thomistic doctrines. He was the founder and moving spirit of the two Thomistic academies: the Accademia filosofico-medica di s. Tommaso in Bologna, with its periodical La scienza italiana, 1876–90, which was subsequently merged with La scuola cattolica of Milan in 1891; and the Accademia romana di s. Tommaso d'Aquino, with its periodical of the same name (1881–99),
of Rome and Bologna, and directed their scholarly journals. He showed himself a determined opponent of Rosmini’s philosophical work.
Principal works: Lezioni di filosofia ordinate allo studio di altre scienze, Florence 1872 (translated into French, Spanish, English, Slavic, and Latin under the title: Institutiones philosophicae); Prolegomeni sopra la filosofia italiana e trattato dell'esistenza di Dio, Bologna 1877; Dei principi fisico-razionali secondo s. Tommaso d'Aquino, there 1881; Il rosminianismo sintesi dell'ontologismo e del panteismo, Rome 1881; La Divina Commedia di Dante Alighieri col Commento, Rome 1887; Il sistema fisico di s. Tommaso, there 1891.