GIOBERTI, VINCENZO. - He is the most representative man of that Catholic liberalism which accompanied our Risorgimento with the intention, energetically combative and doctrinally elaborated, of leveraging the religious tradition of Italians for the redemption of their moral conscience and, consequently, for the political redemption and the unification of the fatherland. Born in Turin on 5 April 1801 to Giuseppe and Marianna Capra, left fatherless early, he was entrusted by his mother for his education to the fathers of the Oratory of St. Philip and directed toward the priestly state. He received Ordination in 1825, and in the same year obtained appointment as an aggregated doctor of the Theological College of the Turin Athenaeum; the following year he was promoted to court chaplain.
From childhood exceedingly avid for reading, he felt all the cultural influences of the age and left a record of his youthful fervor and restlessness in many manuscripts that were partially published after his death. His spiritual itinerary in his youthful years can be summarized in the passage from a phase of doubt to a fideistic and traditionalistic period, and from traditionalism, through an intense rationalistic demand, to deism and pantheism. A letter to Mazzini, published in 1834, in fasc. VI of La giovane Italia, under the title Della repubblica e del cristianesimo and under the pseudonym Demofila, reflects, together with his ideas of social and political reform, the last phase of G.'s thought before exile. He was never enrolled in the Giovane Italia, but he belonged to a "secret and political" society, probably of Carbonarist inspiration. Compromised also by his open profession of liberal ideas, after being relieved of his office at court, he was arrested in May 1833 and held in prison until Sept. of the same year, when Charles Albert, being unable to derive from the trial sufficient grounds for condemnation, ordered that he be "set at liberty and conducted at the same time to the frontiers of the Royal States."
An exile in Paris from Oct. 1833 to Dec. 1834, G. had the opportunity, through personal acquaintance with men and institutions, to verify directly the consequences of some of the most advanced ideas with which he had set out from Italy. The fruit of this experimentation was the repudiation of deism, with an ever more decided aversion to Mazzini's revolutionary methods and to the politico-religious ideas of Lamennais, to whom he had nevertheless felt very close in the pre-exilic period. So that when, in Dec. 1834, he moved to Brussels to the Gaggia Institute, where he would remain until July 1845 as a teacher of philosophy and history, he there matured, through indefatigable studies and intense meditations, a new orientation of thought that found expression in the various works published in this period: Teorica del sovranaturale (Brussels 1838); Introduzione allo studio della filosofia (ibid. 1840); Considerazioni sulle dottrine religiose di V. Cousin (ibid. 1840); Lettre sur les doctrines philosophiques et politiques de M. De Lamennais (ibid. 1841); Del bello
(Venice 1841); Degli errori filosofici di Antonio Rosmini (3 vols., Brussels 1841-44); Del buono (ibid. 1843); Del primato morale e civile degli italiani (2 vols., ibid. 1843); Prolegomeni del Primato (ibid. 1845). The first part of that complex of notes and sketches which would be published posthumously by Solmi under the title Teorica della mente umana, Rosmini e i Rosminiani, La libertà cattolica (Turin 1919) is to be placed between 1837 and 1839; and between the Bello and the Errori there finds its place a notebook of notes for the lectures of the philosophy course, brought to light through the efforts of G. Calò and M. Battistini in the 1947 edition under the title Cours de philosophie (Milan 1841-42). Having left the Istituto Gaggia and settled in Paris in no. 1 of 1845, the exile set to work on the 5 vols. of the Gesuita moderno (Lausanne 1846-47); and he subsequently collected other writings inspired in him by circumstances in the Apologia del libro intitolato «Il gesuita moderno» (Brussels-Livorno 1848), published in April 1848. Among this complex of works, the first, especially the Teorica, the Introduzione and the Primato, enunciate and develop G.'s philosophical, religious and political idea; the others, from the Errori and the Prolegomeni onward, constitute a polemical trailing-off in which the author, who had previously obeyed a magnanimous sentiment of universal conciliation, attacks his opponents and pursues them with insistence and often with intemperance, yielding to a suspicious and bitter humour that would never abandon him throughout his whole life. The great idea of the first works, destined to kindle flames of enthusiasm among Italians and to arouse support for the national cause even in the most distrustful or indifferent circles, is that the principle of Italian union, that is the pre-existing and effective unity, « real, concrete, living and well rooted », which contains within itself the productive motion of every unfolding, cannot be other than Roman Catholicism, the very same that brings Italy back to the centre of the eternal ideal history of humanity. Italy contains within herself all the conditions necessary for her national and political resurgence, and in order to set to work at it she has no need of reckless movements and internal revolutions: she must only regain consciousness of herself (Primato, Milan 1848, p. 616). A moderate, realistic, educational programme, opposed to the revolutionary anxiety of the Mazzinians; a gradual programme that seeks to arrive at « unity » through « union », that is through the federation of the political bodies existing in the peninsula. Above all, eyes are turned to Rome and to Turin, respectively the spiritual centre and the military and political centre of the peninsula: « if it is true that ideas and arms joined together turn the world, from Rome and from Turin in unison hang the destinies of Italy » (ibid., p. 118). He hastens the advent of Italian political unity, as a mature personality conquered by popular consciousness, by making the principal [states] gravitate around the living and personal centre of the Roman pontificate, which is « the civil and perpetual consciousness of Italy » (ibid., p. 398), « the sovereign guarantee of rights, the living constitution of each people in particular and the pivot of their civil and brotherly association » (ibid., p. 211). In Rome, the Italic league would have found the peaceful arbiter that coordinates interests and resolves dissensions in a sphere of superior spirituality. Moreover, since Italy is « the ideal space of the European republic » (ibid., p. 582), and nothing is properly Italian that is not worthy of being given to the world, one could have hoped for the advent of a moral and civil confederation of nations, as they entered one by one into the circle of brotherhood and spiritual fatherhood established by Christianity. Here the « prophecy » of the Primato goes beyond the fortunes of the Italian Risorgimento: the utopia of peace « cannot be brought to effect by means of a European congress, if this does not gather around a living and permanent centre » (ibid., p. 589). The union of men is not founded on protocols nor on armies: and a permanent congress of nations, according to the Primato, is a chimera if it is not coupled with the idea of arbitration, which in its turn, in order not to be reduced to an abstraction, must be incorporated in the pontiff.
The assumption of Pius IX to the pontificate and his first liberal reforms seemed to realize the ideal that the exile had held up before the conscience of Italians. The names of Pius IX and of G. were associated in the enthusiasm of our early 1848, and under the great inspiring aegis the liberating campaign was begun. When the exile, in May 1848, returned to Italy, he gathered there a triumph that marked the summit of what Solmi would call his « hegemony » over Italians. But already, with the allocation of April, Pius IX had marked the limits of his participation in the national cause, already the Piedmontese arms had suffered the defeat of Custoza, so that in difficult moments G. had to assume the responsibility of power, first as president of the Chamber, then as minister without portfolio in the Casati ministry (July 49-August 9, 1848), finally, after the armistice of Salasco and after the Sostegno-Perrone ministry, as president of the Council of Ministers (December 13, 1848 - February 19, 1849). In the position of maximum responsibility he continued inflexibly in his idea: union with a view to unity, union of the States of the peninsula and union of the parties. But, in order to be above the parties, it was still necessary to take sides: drawing near to the left, he had to let the right slip away from him. And there slipped away from him that Società nazionale per la confederazione italiana which he had founded to unite the forces of governments and peoples: it slipped away from him, because it had degenerated into Montanelli's Costituente toscana, which with its extremism served rather to divide the forces further than to unite them. Through the opposition of those whom he calls the « municipals », that is the men bound to the politics of Piedmontese particularism, there also slipped away from him the possibility of realizing the planned Piedmontese intervention in Tuscany and in Rome, to prevent the foreseeable foreign intervention in favour of the deposed princes. He was forced to leave the government a month before Novara.
Minister without portfolio in the De Launay government, extraordinary envoy and minister plenipotentiary in Paris, in May 1849 G. resigned from these offices and withdrew to private life, resuming the figure of the wrathful exile who looks with resentment, not at the fatherland, but at the men who in the fatherland had opposed the execution of his political design. The collected solitude of the last years bore fruit in the great political work Del rinnovamento civile d'Italia (Paris-Turin 1851), which could be called his second Primato, because in it G. intended to vindicate the continuity and straightness of the line that withjoins the various moments of his previous political activity and, extending beyond the present, marks the direction to be followed in the future. He consented to Massari's collecting some of his writings and speeches in the volume of the Operette politiche (Capolago-Turin 1851) and gave a regrettable sequel to the recriminations aroused by the Rinnovamento with various pamphlets of bitter personalistic polemic. To this period philosophy owes the Discorso preliminare to the 2nd ed. of the Teorica del sovranaturale (ibid. 1850): a Discorso aimed at demonstrating the coherence maintained in all his philosophical writings, just as the Rinnovamento was aimed at demonstrating the coherence of his political activity. To this period is likewise due in large part that body of manuscripts, mostly in a fragmentary and draft state, from which Massari was to derive the posthumous works Della protologia (Turin-Paris 1857), Della filosofia della Rivelazione (ibid. 1856) and Della riforma cattolica della Chiesa (ibid. 1856). Of the last of these Balsamo-Crivelli was to prepare a more correct and complete edition under the title: I frammenti «Della riforma cattolica» e «Della libertà cattolica» (Florence 1924). Among the posthumous works the Protologia (=first science) assumes particular importance, the work whose idea G. had conceived even before writing the Introduzione and which he carried in his soul throughout his life, without managing to bring it to completion even in the brief solitude of his second exile. Amid anticipatory visions of the future destiny of the homeland and palingenetic dreams about the destiny of humanity before God, the exile was struck by sudden death, in his little room in Paris, on the night between 25 and 26 Oct. 1852.
As for G.'s political activity, criticism almost unanimously recognizes the essential contribution he made to the cause of the Risorgimento, both for the inspired first message with which he drew the most intimate spiritual forces of our people into the national orbit, and for having counterbalanced with a moderate and realistic program the audacities of the revolutionary current, and finally for the "prophecies" of the Rinnovamento which were a guide to the statesmen of Piedmont and especially to Cavour in the subsequent developments of national policy during the decade of preparation and beyond.
The judgment is not equally concordant as regards the "coherence" and "gradualness" that he claimed to have always maintained in the passage from one phase to another of his ideological campaign and his militant politics. There is no lack of those who, like Onodeo (V. G. e la sua evoluzione politica, Turin 1941), describe the spiritual process of the exile as a formless rhapsody of contradictions either unconscious or willed and calculated, or who, like Croce (Discorsi di varia filosofia, I, Bari 1945, pp. 95-96), judge that he played too much with tangled shifts and astute combinations, which then fell apart in his hands. From the first concordant enthusiasms aroused by the Primato, Catholics passed to diffidence and hostility, when the strict dialectic of that work, which tended to reconcile all forces in the common cause, yielded to an antagonistic need to exclude what he called "the exclusivism of the exclusivists" and began the intemperate campaign against the Jesuits. The five ponderous volumes of Il gesuita moderno, which had in the peninsula the prompt success of fourteen thousand copies sold, were the ferment of the popular risings that broke out in Turin, Genoa and Cagliari against the Jesuits, and to the exile's persuasion are certainly due the expulsions of the Jesuits from Sardinia, from Genoa and the one decreed on 2 March '48 by Turin. G.'s jurisdictional policy, attempted by him or advocated by him in his writings, limited the rights of the Church too decisively to the advantage of those of the State for the Catholic priest to be seen living peacefully side by side in the Turin statesman. Apart from all this, which explains the aversions and condemnations, it must be recognized that between the Guelphism of the Primato and the liberalism of the Rinnovamento there is not the strident contradiction that some impute to him. There is nothing illiberal in the Guelphism of the Primato, nothing that could suggest hierocracy and theocracy, if the substance of G.'s Guelphism is the affirmation of the decisive influence that the religious factor and inspiration should have had for the Italians in their political redemption. Reciprocally, there is nothing laicistic in the liberalism of the Rinnovamento, where he, after the refutation of events, while renouncing temporality and papal guidance, and while entrusting the political direction of the nation to the lay powers, marked out for them the task of transferring to Rome to constitute there the new Italy, pacified in the distinction and harmony of the civil and ecclesiastical powers, guardian of the values of Catholic transcendence, the only ones able to save Europe from the moral decadence that fatally follows pantheistic chaos. The ideability of the State is indeed identified, in the Primato and in the Rinnovamento, with the ideability of the nation, and the State therein is the expression of the maximum moral awareness reached by the aristocracies of intellect which, in the government of public affairs, are capable of drawing the people to themselves, educating them. But not even in G.'s last political works is there anything that could suggest Hegel's "ethical State" or a purely earthly conclusion of human destiny. In the conscience of the men who are capable and worthy of governing it, the State always places itself in confrontation with the actual infinite, personally determined in its absoluteness, that is, with God, who judges history and judges States, whereas every possibility of a morally regulated civil fellowship would be lost if earthly life were abandoned to the potential infinite, that is, to the passage of time in the successive moments of human finitude. The Catholic idea, personified in the magisterium of Rome, continues to be, in the Rinnovamento, the inspirer in the immense task of human redemption.
G.'s philosophical ideology was subject to no less harsh criticism and censure than that which accompanied his political activity. Some approval in religious circles initially greeted the Introduzione allo studio della filosofia, and even an ontological strain persisted in the Jesuit schools of Sicily, in the wake of the Giobertian Father Giuseppe Romano, professor of philosophy at the Collegio Massimo in Palermo. But, especially after the campaign unleashed by G. against the Order, it was natural that the fathers should arm themselves in defense and further define the critical position they had assumed from the outset, with the writings of Curci, Sordi, Liberatore and others, pronouncing the severest condemnation against every aspect of G.'s activity. He was chiefly reproached with the doctrine of intuition which, by abolishing the intermediary of the intelligible species between the human spirit and its object, identifies man with God and, with the consequent pantheism, opens the way to rationalism: that rationalism which, skillfully concealed in G.'s early writings, would later reveal itself openly in the posthumous works, with the aim of secularizing the State and resolving religion into philosophy. Everything that for the Jesuits was grounds for condemnation was grounds for praise for those who judged G. from the other shore, that is, for the Hegelians who, with Spaventa first, and then with Gentile and Saitta, inserted the doctrine of the Turin abbot into the heaven of the development of modern idealistic immanentism. The idealistic interpretation was used by Padovani to reaffirm the condemnation from the standpoint of Catholic orthodoxy. But with other writings by Piccoli, Calò, Pavese, Bonomi, Palhoriès, Bonafede, and Bruers, criticism is arriving at an attitude less unfavorable to G., with due emphasis on all the elements of his doctrine that fall within the furrow of Catholic tradition.
For a rapid inventory, which may allow some orientation in the face of critical debates, it is useful to distinguish in G.'s philosophical activity two moments, hinging on the one hand on the Introduzione and on the other on the Protologia and the other posthumous works. The first is characterized by "ontologism," the second by "transcendent psychologism." An examination of the intermediate writings, in the chronological succession indicated, would make it possible to establish the continuity and progression between the two moments.
In the initial phase, almost as if to make amends for the youthful pantheistic and deistic "error," G. was wholly taken up with the need to save the "externality" or, as one might say, the transcendence of the object of intelligence over the act of understanding. All the errors of modern thought are reduced by him to "psychologism," that is, to the reduction of the object to a mode of being of the knowing subject, whether with sensualism one claims to derive the idea from pure sensibility, that is, from an internal modification barren of objectivity; or whether with Kantianism one subjects the matter of knowledge to the subjective forms of understanding and thus lets the in-itself of the thing escape. The finitude and contingency of man do not provide the conditions of a scientific knowledge, that is, absolute and necessary, unless man transcends the conditions proper to him and attains in the known object what is lacking in the knowing subject. Hence philosophical psychologism is followed by all the forms of hedonism, of social and political sensualism, due to the loss of a universal criterion of truth and of an authoritative principle that restrains individual arbitrariness and disciplines the tumultuous moods of the masses. Ontologism is opposed to psychologism, for which the Idea, instead of positing itself as the subjective term of understanding, identifies itself with its absolute object, that is, with the Being which, being understood by us insofar as it posits itself, posits itself insofar as it is understood (Introduzione allo studio della filosofia, I, Capolago 1845, ch. 4). The Idea is the true absolute and eternal, insofar as it presents itself to man's intuition. The Idea cannot be demonstrated, but must be admitted as a primitive truth, because it is the source of every proof and every demonstration, as it is the foundation of the entire encyclopedia of the sciences and the keystone of the entire moral and social edifice. The psychological First and the philosophical First identify themselves with the ontological First: the first Idea identifies itself with the first Being, that is, with God (ibid., pp. 148-45).
It is clear that, if G.'s doctrine had stopped at this level, it would not have avoided the pantheistic and immanentistic outcome imputed to it by its vigilant opponents. In fact, human thought is not resolved into the passivity of intuition, except to reconstitute itself, as absolute thought, in the intuited object. The ontologistic immanence of the I in God is the historical and logical precedent of the idealistic immanence of God in the I. But G. guards against the pantheistic and immanentistic consequences of ontologism, specifying that the intuition of the Idea is intuition of the Idea in its relations with created nature, that is, it is intuition of the ideal formula: "Being creates the existent" (ibid., p. 195). The distinction that risked being lost with the identification of the act of knowing with the object of intuition is saved in the two terms of the judgment, in which the distinction between God and the soul, between Being and the existent, between the Creator and the creature reappears: and between the two terms the copula of creation carries out its unifying and disjunctive function. The concept of creation, which is therefore intrinsic to the formula, becomes central in G.'s entire ideology and serves him to distinguish the heterodox systems, which have ignored it and therefore have fallen into immanentism and pantheism, from the orthodox system of thought which is preserved through the centuries by Catholic tradition. The principal difficulties of speculation, in which heterodoxy remains entangled, are overcome with that concept, according to an analysis that G. deepens and develops in every direction (ibid., pp. 180-85; ch. 5, pp. 47-50). The concept of creation is the presupposition of the concept of causality, insofar as the former is the concept of absolute causation; and thus the difficulty is overcome which Kant, against the possibility of demonstrating the existence of God, opposed to the cosmological argument, on account of the regression to infinity which he supposed in the series of effects and causes. Creationism resolves the antinomy of the one and the many, insofar as the varied multiplicity of creatures bursts forth from the absolute cause, without affecting the unity of the principle. Creationism resolves the antinomy of the discrete and the continuous, insofar as the existent is the discrete, while Being is the continuous and creation is the conjugation of both: the continuous is in organic relation with the discrete insofar as it creates it and in its act joins it. The same may be said of the antinomy of the infinite and the finite: the infinite comprehends the finite, without losing its absoluteness in finite modes and without identifying them with the infinite, insofar as the infinite contains the finite by way of creative efficiency and not of containment or modality. These are elements of doctrine that should not be lost for the philosophy of Christianity.
However, if with the intuition of the ideal formula and of the creative bond between the Being and the existent G. saved himself from the immanentist consequences of ontologism, there arose the difficulty of combining intuition and formula, that is, of reducing to an immediate apprehension a formula that is judgment and therefore mediation. Under the stimulus of this difficulty the passage is determined from the ontologism of the first works, through the intermediate works, and especially the Errori and the Prolegomeni, to the "transcendent psychologism" of the Protologia. The characteristic motive of this second moment of Gioberti's speculation is the pre-eminent function assumed in it by "reflection," that is, by the act through which the existent makes the object of intuition its own, elaborates it and expresses it of itself as its own meaningful word, as verbum mentis (Protologia, I, Turin-Paris 1858, pp. 153, 183, 253). Reflection was not lacking in the first works, alongside intuition, but there it appeared as nothing other than a secondary intuition, as a reverberation of intuition, which did not directly engage the activity of the knowing subject. Now, instead, the primacy is assigned to reflection and intuition loses the character of actual knowledge, of immediate vision of the object, and becomes potential, virtual thought, "possibility of knowledge," which it falls to reflection to develop and actualize (ibid., pp. 138-39, 141-142, 263; Il rinnovamento civile d'Italia, III, Bari 1912, pp. 4-6). Although it is always God who, present to the human mentality with his creative act, determines in us the possibility of knowing him, it falls to human reflection to put into act the means to recognize him. Therefore God is no longer an axiom, but a theorem: he is no longer an object of intuition, but of rational demonstration (Discorso preliminare alla Teorica del sovranaturale, I, Capolago and Turin 1850, p. 223; Protologia, I, p. 291; II, p. 42). The mere intuition, without the aid of reflective cognition, is excluded from language as from science. This dominant motif of the Protologia makes it clear how the ontological traces that nonetheless persist in it are to be corrected by emphasizing the active powers of the subject, so that the distinction between the knower and the known is further marked and thus the transcendence of the divine is reaffirmed, in accordance with the purpose declared by G. when he called this second phase of his doctrine "transcendent psychologism" and not "transcendental psychologism," contrary to the variation unduly introduced by idealist criticism.
Within the orbit of the dominant theme, there accumulate, in the disordered and fragmentary pages of the Protologia, motifs of rare speculative depth to which it is possible here to allude only with a series of statements: the distinction between the infinite actuality, which is proper to God, and the potential infinity or indefinite finiteness that is its projection and image on the plane of created nature (Protologia, I, pp. 185-89, 239-42, 327-33, 343; II, pp. 319-20); the denounced Hegelian error of mistaking the indefinite process of the human mentality for the actual infinite which the human mentality can indeed signify, referring it to God, but can never attain as its own condition (ibid., I, pp. 455, 466); universal dialectism as an ever-unfinished process of the finite mentality for joining the terms of sensible experience and of ideation with a view to the final synthesis, that is, to the absolute relation established essentially in God and participated in image through the creative act (ibid., pp. 239, 244, 249, 285, 478); the contradictoriness or adialecticity of contradiction (ibid., I, pp. 301, 487; II, pp. 133, 166, 307); evil conceived as moral sophistry or interruption of the dialectical process that joins the existent to its principle (Introduzione allo studio della filosofia, ch. 8, ed. cit., p. 301; Protol., II, pp. 318, 323, 342-43); art as a "fiction of infinity" on the part of the human spirit which, in creating its phantom, possesses and enjoys itself therein (Del bello, ch. 5, Venice 1849, p. 55; Protol., I, p. 204, 345; II, p. 73); modern thought seen as a great heterodox poem, true as poetry, false as philosophy, seen that is as the product of an intellectual mythology which, instead of keeping the human act transparent to the allusion to the transcendent divine, closes in upon itself to sanction the divine self-sufficiency of the world and of man (Del bello, ch. 10, p. 142; Protol., I, p. 86; II, pp. 156-60); the personal conception of being in its absolute principle and in the finite persons who are destined, after the earthly trial, to live together in the palingenesian society of souls, in the beatifying presence of God (Protol., I, pp. 193-94, 360-61, 464; II, p. 414, 475-76, 480, 482).
Highly appreciable in G.'s genius is the demand to bind every contingent moment of practical and political reality to the supreme postulates of the moral and religious order, making action and speculation proceed together, and involving the Italian Risorgimento in the cycle of a cosmic and metaphysical redemption. The urgency of political struggle and the brevity of life did not allow him to close the system within clear and definite lines of doctrine. In the pages of the Rinnovamento he attained the vigor of a sober, energetic, incisive expression, literarily valuable. A physical infirmity, which he carried throughout his life, influenced his suspicious and irascible temper, unstable in love and in friendship. The yearning for a magnanimous, universal understanding of men, ideas, and parties was in competition with an antagonistic temperament, insistent and intemperate in polemic and in personal attack. Proud, greedy for recognition and approval, he despised the fatuity of honors. He asked for himself no more than was sufficient for him to live, and he died in povertà, ricco della visione palingenesiana di cui si animano le ultime sue carte lasciate in eredità alla scienza e in dono di speranza agli uomini.
All of G.'s works are on the Index (decrees of 30 May 1849; 14 Jan. 1852).
BIBLI: Fra le opere del G. si citano ancora, oltre le indicate: Pensieri di V. G., Miscellanea, Torino 1859-60; Ricordi biografici e carteggio, ivi 1860-62. Altri scritti postumi a cura di E. Solmi: Meditazioni filosofiche inedite di V. G., Firenze 1909; a cura di G. Balsamo-Crivelli: Ultima replica ai Municipali, Torino 1917; a cura di G. Gentile e G. Balsamo-Crivelli: Epistolario, 11 voll., ivi 1927-37; a cura di G. Calò e M. Battistini: Cours de philosophie (1821-42), Milano 1947. Un'antologia degli scritti del G. a cura di G. Gentile, reca il titolo: Nuova protologia, Bari 1912. L'edizione nazionale delle opere edite e inedite di V. G. comprende i seguenti volumi: I) Prolegomena del Primato morale e civile degli Italiani, a cura di E. Castelli, Milano 1938; II-III) Del primato morale e civile degli Italiani, a cura di U. Redanò, 2 voll., ivi 1938-39; IV-V) Introduzione allo studio della filosofia, a cura di G. Calò, 2 voll., ivi 1939-41; VIII-X) Degli errori filosofici di Antonio Rosmini, a cura di U. Redanò, ivi 1939; XII) Del bello, a cura di E. Castelli, ivi 1939; XIII) Del buono, a cura dello stesso, ivi 1939; XIII-XVIII) Il kemista moderno, a cura di M. F. Scicca, ivi 1940-42.
Studies: a) on G.'s political thought: D. Berti, Di V. G. «formatore politico e ministro, Florence 1881; E. Solmi, Mazzini e G., Milan 1913; B. Giuliano, Il primato di un popolo: Fichte e G., Catania 1917; G. Maggiore, G. e Fichte, Milan 1918; A. Anzilotti, G., Florence 1922; id., La funzione storica del giobertino, Florence 1923; G. Gentile, I profeti del Risorgimento italiano, ibid. 1923; A. Bruni, V. G., Turin 1937; A. Omodeo, V. G. e la sua evoluzione politica, ibid. 1941; b) on his philosophical thought in general: B. Spaventa, La filosofia di G., Naples 1865; G. Gentile, Rosmini e G., Pisa 1868; G. Saitta, Il pensiero di V. G., Messina 1917; V. Piccoli, V. G., Rome 1923; U. Padovani, V. G. e il cattolicesimo, Milan 1927; S. Caramella, La formazione della filosofia giobertina, Genoa 1927; F. Palboris, G., Paris 1929; G. Bonafede, V. G., Palermo 1941; A. Bruera, Scritti filosofici, Bologna 1941; B. Croce, Del G. filosofo, in Discori di varia filosofia, Bari 1945, pp. 73-96; L. Stefanini, G., Milan 1947; S. Scimi, Il trionfo dell'ontologismo in Sicilia, Giuseppe Romano, Rome 1950, pp. 47-64; G. Bonafede, G. e la critica, Palermo 1950; c) on his aesthetic thought: A. Faggi, V. G., esteto e letterato, Palermo 1901; V. Piccoli, L'estetica di V. G., Milan-Rome 1917; S. Caramella, Lo sviluppo dell'estetica giobertina, in Giornale critico della fil. it., 2 (1921), fasc. 1, 2; C. Sgroi, L'estetica e la critica letteraria di V. G., Florence 1921; C. Calcaterra, Gli studi danteschi di V. G., in Dante e il Piemonte, Turin 1922. See also the bibliographical guide by A. Bruera, G., Rome 1924.
Luigi Stefanini