MAMIANI, TERENZIO della ROVERE. - Politician and writer, b. at Pesaro on 27 Sept. 1799, d. at Rome on 21 June 1885.
He took an active part in the risings of the Romagna in 1831, for which he was condemned to exile by Gregory XVI, and he went to France. Repatriated after the amnesty of Pius IX, he was at Rome minister of the Interior and then of Foreign Affairs (1848); but the Pope's flight to Gaeta and the fall of the Mazzinian Republic decided him to withdraw to Genoa and to Turin. Here he was a deputy in Parliament, professor of the history of philosophy at the University, 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 great number of writings, especially on philosophy; but he is not an original thinker and may now be considered to have set. A few works, however, may still be remembered: Del rinnovamento della filosofia italiana (Paris 1834; placed on the Index, 27 Aug. 1838), in which he sets out his system of ontological idealism (according to which the first certainty of being lies in the reality of thought), joined to a methodical eclecticism that seeks to fuse together, in order to accommodate the new times, the ancient methods of St. Thomas, Telesio, Campanella, Galileo, Vinci, Vico; but Rosmini's lashings "converted" him to Platonism, which he had previously regarded with hesitation, and in the Confessioni di un metafisico (2 vols., Florence 1865; placed on the Index, 14 Feb. 1881) and in the Compendio e sintesi della propria filosofia (Turin 1866; placed on the Index, 14 Feb. 1881), he reconstructs his metaphysics, in full adherence to the Platonic theories of the pre-existence of ideas, to the Anselmian ontological argument, as proof of the existence of God, falling, in spite of his protest, into an at least vague pantheism. Already several strong veins of laicism permeated here and there the works mentioned and others, also condemned to the Index; but they appear more clearly in La religione dell'avvenire. Della religione positiva e perpetua del genere umano (Milan 1879; placed on the Index, 13 Jan. 1880) where the Incarnation is denied and the satisfactory value of the Passion of Jesus Christ, the dogmas are excluded, though they always hold good as the lofty signification of a myth, the prophecies are reduced to natural facts, and all value is taken from the Church. And in order to justify juridically and politically the separation of State from Church, he wrote: Teorica della religione e dello Stato (Florence 1868; placed on the Index, 22 March 1869); and Del Papato negli ultimi tre secoli (posthumous, Milan 1885; placed on the Index, 7 Sept. 1885). In 1870 he founded the review: La filosofia delle scuole italiane (destined ultimately to favour his theories), whose title Ferri, after profusions of praise, changed in the year after the M.'s death to Rivista italiana di filosofia, as a sign of the abandonment of the master's ideas.