MAMIANI, TERENZIO della ROVERE. – Politician and writer, born in Pesaro on 27 Sept. 1799, died in Rome on 21 June 1885.
He took a lively part in the uprisings in the Romagna in 1831, for which he was condemned to exile by Gregory XVI and went to France. After the amnesty of Pius IX he returned home and in Rome served as Minister of the Interior and then of Foreign Affairs (1848); but the Pope’s flight to Gaeta and the fall of the short-lived Republic led him to withdraw to Genoa and Turin. There he became a deputy to Parliament, professor of the history of philosophy at the University, and Minister of Education; in 1864 he was named 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; yet he was not an original thinker and may now be considered outmoded. Some works, however, may still be recalled: Del rinnovamento della filosofia italiana (Paris 1834; placed on the Index, 27 Aug. 1838), in which he 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 aims to blend, in order to accommodate the new times, the ancient methods of St Thomas, Telesio, Campanella, Galileo, Leonardo, and Vico; yet the lashes of Rosmini “converted” him to Platonism, which he had previously viewed with hesitation, and in the Confessioni di un metafisico (2 vols., Florence 1865; placed on the Index, 14 Feb. 1881) and in Compendio e sintesi della propria filosofia (Turin 1866; placed on the Index, 14 Feb. 1881) he reconstructs his metaphysics in full adherence to Platonic theories of the pre-existence of ideas and to Anselm’s ontological argument as proof of the existence of God, falling—despite his protest—into at least a vague pantheism. Already several strong veins of secularism permeated 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; placed on the Index, 13 Jan. 1880), where he denies the Incarnation and the expiatory value of Christ’s Passion, excludes dogmas—though still valid as lofty significations of a myth—reduces prophecies to natural events, and strips the Church of all authority. To justify juridically and politically the separation of Church and State, he wrote: Teoria 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 journal La filosofia delle scuole italiane (intended in the end to promote his theories); after lavish praise, however, Ferri changed its title the year after Mamiani’s death to Rivista italiana di filosofia, as a sign of abandoning his master’s ideas.