GALLUPPI, PASQUALE - Philosophy, born at Tropea, in Calabria, to Baron Vincenzo on 2 April 1770, died at Naples on 13 December 1846. He received his first philosophical and mathematical formation in his native city and in the Seminary of S. Lucia del Mela, in Sicily; he then attended the University of Naples, where his teacher was the well-known regalist Francesco Conforti. Already at Tropea G. had come into contact with Leibnizian thought, and from the theological atmosphere of his native environment he had derived a deep interest in theological problems, nourishing himself on strong biblical and patristic studies and fixing his particular interest on St. Augustine. The Jansenist inspiration of his sources and of his teachers was not extraneous to these Augustinian preferences; and this explains how the first publication of G., the Memoria apologetica (1795), awaited to clarify his own thought on the relations between nature and Grace, was theological in character, in polemic with ecclesiastical elements of his city.
From the study of Cartesian and Leibnizian philosophy G. passed to that of Condillac, deriving from it the awareness both of the necessity of a critical inquiry into knowledge and of the insufficiency of sensism; a document of this anti-sensism remains the pamphlet Su l'analisi e su la sintesi (1807). Between 1807 and 1815 G. came into contact with Kantianism, of which he recognized the critique of German dogmatism, accepted the necessity of a critical problem, but rejected its particular aprioristic solution. In this period he went on refining and maturing his own thought, outlined in a brief writing (1815) circulated as a preface to his principal work and systematic exposition of his thought, the Saggio filosofico su la critica della conoscenza (6 vols., 1819-32). He subsequently published (1820-27) in six small volumes the Elementi di filosofia (Logica pura, Psicologia, Ideologia, Logica mista, Filosofia morale, Teologia naturale); and in 1827 thirteen Lettere filosofiche sulle vicende della filosofia relativamente ai principi delle conoscenze umane da Cartesio sino a Kant inclusivamente; in 1838 a Lettera XIV was added, in which the situation of French philosophy of that time was presented and it was shown how the course of modern problems of thought demanded the author's own solution.
The fame G. had by now acquired in Italy and abroad earned him the call to the chair of "intellectual" or theoretical "philosophy" at the University of Naples (4 October 1831). In the following November the philosopher delivered a lofty inaugural lecture, later published as Introduzione a fronte delle Lezioni di logica e metafisica (4 vols., 1832-34), which constitute the fruit of his academic teaching. To the period of his Neapolitan stay belong: a volume of Storia della filosofia (1840), the first of the twelve of which the work was to consist, of which, besides the one published, a second remains in manuscript; the four volumes of a Filosofia della volontà (1832-40), a work left incomplete. On 29 December 1838 the Academy of France, on the proposal of V. Cousin, appointed G. a foreign corresponding member, and the king of France, on the proposal of the minister Guizot, decorated him with the Legion of Honour; G. discharged the debt by sending to the Academy the Considerazioni filosofiche sull'idroalismo trascendentale e sul razionalismo assoluto (1841). Besides the writings mentioned, two pamphlets of a political character are noteworthy: Opuscoli filosofici sulla libertà individuale; La sguarda d'Europa sul Regno di Napoli (both 1820).
Scrupulous in scientific work, G. did not easily recede from his own opinions; his thought is crystalline, but the exposition is at times slovenly and betrays a literary preparation inadequate to his philosophical one; of a liberal spirit, he was averse to every excess of Jacobinism; sincerely religious, he felt the Jansenist atmosphere of the time, but he always preserved and in the last years of his life deepened a fundamental and conscious Catholic orthodoxy, of which numerous manuscript documents remain; indeed, from a letter to Rosmini and from another to a Jesuit father not further identified, it is possible to discern an essential apologetic inspiration of his speculation; he looked forward to a decisive restoration of spiritual and Catholic values and worked to "place a dike against the torrent of unbelief, daughter of false philosophy" (G. Di Napoli, p. 144): the general gnoseological atmosphere of the philosophy contemporary with him determined him to underline the critical aspect of speculative inquiry, but his thought was exquisitely, if not completely in systematic line, metaphysical.
The Galluppian philosophy, qualified by its author as a "philosophy of experience," intends, on the modern terrain of the gnoseological problem, to save together the rights of experience and of thought; against sensism and empiricism on the one hand, and against transcendentalism on the other, G. affirms the indispensability of an ontic datum grasped in experience and of the consequent spiritualizing and universalizing elaboration proper to the intelligence: neither pure passivity of sense, therefore, nor creative apriorism, but rational mediation of the empirical immediacy.
The point of departure is given, with Augustine and with Descartes, by self-consciousness, which grasps and affirms a real thing, the "me," and which provides that "shore of existence" that was so dear to the philosopher. Long and penetrating are the reflections scattered by G. in his works on this radicality of self-consciousness, which, though inclined to an excessive psychologism, departs from Cartesian conscientialism as a position of speculative prevalence of the cogito. And against the Cartesian deformation of self-consciousness, closed within its own world, G. affirms that "one cannot have from the human spirit the perception of the me without having that of an outside of me" (Saggio, III, § 1); here is the Galluppian doctrine of external perception "from the outside," which, against all modern speculation from Descartes to Kant and to Rosmini, is vindicated in its extra-subjectivity, in its immediacy, even while recognizing a relativity of it to the subject.
On these data given to the subject, and given precisely as reality in itself intuited by the subject, there operates "mediation," that is, the abstracting and universalizing activity of thought, which is endowed with the two faculties with the functions of analysis and synthesis; with the first the concept is grasped in the perceived datum, with the second it is attributed to the manifold and distinguished from others. Into this differentiating or classifying attribution enter two notions that the spirit forms for itself by comparison or synthesis: identity and diversity, which, having no counterpart in an objective reality or one given to the subject, are called by G. subjective; which has led several critics, erroneously, to think of the Kantian a priori.
As regards the objectivity or subjectivity of notions, one must distinguish origin from value: the notions of identity and of diversity are subjective in origin because derived from the comparative activity of the spirit, and also in value because there corresponds to them no datum that is, as absolute reality, the identical and the diverse; the notions of substance and of cause are objective in origin because they derive from a datum, and in value because they correspond to it; the notion of God is subjective in origin because it does not derive from a datum but is the fruit of rational mediation, yet it is objective in value because there corresponds to it a reality that is God.
On the basis of a realistic epistemology, G. constructs a solid metaphysics concerning God and man, which, even in its gaps, is consciously spiritualist and leads toward an ethico-juridical doctrine inspired by the great Christian tradition. The Kantian influence is undeniable in the exaltation of duty against the pure utilitarianism of his contemporary ideologues; but the practical synthetic a priori judgments admitted by G. coincide only in their logical-formal consideration with the Kantian ones: that is, G. calls practical judgments synthetic a priori insofar as to the subject, representing a human action, there is joined the predicate "duty," which is not identical with it; and while the subject of practical judgments is an objective notion because derived from a perceived datum, the predicate "duty" is a subjective notion, like that of merit. Therefore even in morals G.'s alleged Kantianism is unjustified.
The fortune of Galluppi's philosophy, after an initial universal consensus, showed a notable decline from 1860 onward, particularly because of the impetuous Giobertian ontologism linked to nationalist movements, and in the second half of the century it was overshadowed by the positivist wave. After the First World War, interest in G.'s figure and thought has grown, as demonstrated by the works that have appeared in the last fifteen years.
Bibliography10 works
Giovanni Di Napoli