FARDELLA, MICHELANGELO. — Philosopher, born at Trapani in 1650, died at Naples on 8 January 1718. At Messina he came into contact with G. A. Borelli; in Paris, during three years, he frequented Cartesian circles; he taught at Rome and Modena, until in 1693 he was called to the University of Padua. In 1691 he published a Logica at Venice (Universae philosophiae systema, tomus I); in 1695 a treatise on mathematics; in 1698 his major work, Animae humane natura ab Augustino detecta (Venice 1698). Minor writings, especially polemical ones, appeared in the Galleria di Minerva. In 1709 he went to teach in Barcelona; he returned to Naples in 1718.
A disorderly and uncertain thinker, he nevertheless enjoyed a very widespread reputation; he corresponded with Leibniz, whose doctrine of monads he seems to have approached; he was not unknown to Berkeley, whose immaterialism he seemed to approximate. In reality, his principal merit was having helped to spread knowledge of Cartesianism in Italy, connecting it with the Augustinian tradition and relating it to certain themes of Galilean scientific inquiry. With regard to the thorny problem of the relationship between extension and thought, he seemed to incline toward Malebranche’s position, casting doubt on the reality of material extension, of a world of external objects. Indeed, albeit in a hypothetical form—so as to earn from Berkeley the accusation of scepticism—he came to ask why God, who could act directly upon the soul, should, with little economy (entità non sunt praeter necessitatem multiplicanda), have recourse to the intermediary of matter, whose function cannot be justified and whose direct action upon the soul appears incomprehensible. If dreams and hallucinations are continual proofs that a person may have impressions without corresponding objects existing, “why could it not be the case that, although the sun had never existed, the eye nevertheless sees the sun as really present?” After discussing the reality of matter in the Logica, in the treatise On the Soul he proceeded to demonstrate, on Augustinian foundations, the spirituality of the soul and the value of interiority, dwelling, among other things, on the theme of illumination. The work, which is largely occupied with an examination of the De quantitate animae, the De immortalitatus animae, and Book X of the De Trinitate of S. Agostino, is rich in a vivid sense of inner experience, in which the fertile themes of Cartesian-Malebranchian meditation are harmonized within the Augustinian tradition.