De Ruggiero, Guido

DE RUGGIERO, GUIDO. - Historian of philosophy and publicist, b. in Naples on March 23, 1888, d. in Rome on Dec. 29, 1948. Professor of the history of philosophy first at the Magistero, then in the Faculty of Letters of Rome. At first an actualist of a form of actualism more intransigent than that of Gentile, he later drew close to Croce's historicism. Subsequently (Revisioni idealistiche, in Educazione nazionale, 3 [1933]) he rejected the reduction of philosophy to the methodology of history and strove to vindicate the realistic exigency within idealism itself (Il ritorno alla ragione, Bari 1946): reason is not entirely immanent in the flow of reality (historical reason), but is, at the same time, transcendent (metahistorical reason); man, placing himself at the apex of the supreme values, measures the insufficiency of what is, in the face of what ought to be.

To D. R. is owed (and this is his most important work) a Storia della filosofia (Bari 1920 ff.) in 15 vols. The dialectical method and the idealistic point of view often force D. R. into one-sided interpretations that do not correspond to historical objectivity (especially in the volumes on ancient and Christian thought); nor are there lacking overused commonplaces of secularist rationalism (especially in the volumes on the Reformation and Counter-Reformation). The bibliography that D. R. uses is almost exclusively limited to the idealistic and Protestant one. Among his writings on the history of political thought, the Storia del liberalismo europeo (2nd ed., Bari 1944) should be remembered.