MAMIANI, TERENZIO della ROVERE. — Politician and writer, b. at Pesaro on 27 September 1799, d. at Rome on 21 June 1885.
He took an active part in the disturbances in the Romagna in 1831, for which Gregorio XVI condemned him to exile, and he went to France. Returning to his homeland after the amnesty of Pio IX, he was Minister of the Interior and then of Foreign Affairs at Rome (1848); but the Pope’s flight to Gaeta and the fall of the Mazzinian Republic led him to withdraw to Genoa and Turin. There he was a deputy in Parliament, professor of the history of philosophy at the University, and Minister of Education; in 1864 he was appointed senator of the Kingdom, and in 1871 professor of the history of philosophy at the University of Rome.
He left a large number of writings, especially on philosophy; but he is not an original thinker and may now be regarded as obsolete. A few works, however, may still be recalled: Del rinnovamento della filosofia italiana (Paris 1834; on the Index, 27 August 1838), which expounds his system of ontological idealism (according to which the first certainty of being lies in the reality of thought), combined with a methodical eclecticism that sought, in keeping with the new times, to fuse the ancient methods of s. Tommaso, Telesio, Campanella, Galileo, Vinci, and Vico; but Rosmini’s lashings “converted” him to Platonism, which he had previously regarded hesitantly, and in the Confessioni di un metafisico (2 vols., Florence 1865; on the Index, 14 February 1881) and the Compendio e sintesi della propria filosofia (Turin 1866; on the Index, 14 February 1881), he reconstructed his metaphysics in full adherence to the Platonic theories of the pre-existence of ideas and to the Anselmian ontological argument as proof of the existence of God, falling, despite his protest, into at least a vague pantheism. Several strong currents of secularism already permeated here and there the works mentioned and others, likewise condemned to the Index; but they appear more clearly in La religione dell'avvenire. Della religione positiva e perpetua del genere umano (Milan 1879; on the Index, 13 January 1880), where the Incarnation and the satisfactive value of the Passion of Jesus Christ are denied, dogmas are excluded, though they continue to be valid as the elevated significance of a myth, prophecies are reduced to natural events, and all value is denied to the Church. And in order to justify juridically and politically the separation of Church and State, he wrote: Teorica della religione e dello Stato (Florence 1868; on the Index, 22 March 1869); and Del Papato negli ultimi tre secoli (posthumous, Milan 1885; on the Index, 7 September 1885). In 1870 he founded the journal La filosofia delle scuole italiane (ultimately intended to promote his theories); Ferri, after lavish praise, changed its title in the year following M.’s death to Rivista italiana di filosofia, as a sign of the abandonment of the master’s ideas.