FARDELLA, MICHELANGELO. - Philosopher, b. at Trapani in 1650, d. at Naples on 8 Jan. 1718. He was in Messina in contact with G. A. Borelli, and in Paris for three years he frequented Cartesian circles; he taught in Rome and in Modena, until in 1693 he was called to the University of Padua. In 1691 he published in Venice a Logica (Universae philosophiae systema, tomus I); in '95 a treatise on mathematics; in '98 his major work Animae humanae 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 quite widespread fame; he was in correspondence with Leibniz, with whose doctrine of monads he seems to converge; he was not unknown to Berkeley, to whose immaterialism he seemed to draw near. In reality his principal merit was that of having helped to spread in Italy the knowledge of Cartesianism, connecting it with the Augustinian tradition and placing it in relation with certain themes of Galilean scientific inquiry. Regarding the burning problem of the relation between extension and thought, he seemed to orient himself in the direction of Malebranche, casting doubt on the reality of a material extension, of a world of external objects. Indeed, albeit in a dubitative form, such as to earn him from Berkeley the accusation of skepticism, he came to ask himself why God, who could act directly on the soul, should have had to resort, uneconomically (entia non sunt praeter necessitatem multiplicanda), to the intermediary of matter, whose function one cannot justify and whose direct action on the soul appears incomprehensible. If dreams and hallucinations are continual proofs that man can have impressions without corresponding objects existing, «why could it not be that, even though the sun had never existed, the eye nevertheless sees the sun as really present?». After discussing in the Logica the reality of matter, in the treatise On the Soul he went on to demonstrate on Augustinian bases the spirituality of the soul and the value of interiority, insisting among other things on the theme of illumination. The work, which is for the most part occupied with the examination of the De quantitate animae, the De immortalitate animae, and Book X of the De Trinitate of St. Augustine, is rich in a vivid sense of inner experience, wherein the fruitful themes of Cartesian-Malebranchian meditation are harmonized within the Augustinian tradition.