PROBLEMATICISMO. — “Problematica” is generally used to designate every “critical philosophy,” that is, every method that intends to begin philosophizing with an examination of its own “possibility” (critique of knowledge, phenomenology); in antiquity, an example of p. is Aristotle’s “Book of Aporias” (Met., III), and in our own day the philosophy of N. Hartmann (cf. Grundzüge einer Metaphysik der Erkenntnis, 3rd ed., Berlin 1938).
Instead, p. has a precise meaning in the work of U. Spirito. In the tension between realism and idealism that runs through the development of all modern thought, the most flagrant contradiction has emerged, insofar as the culminating point of anti-intellectualism is converted intellectualism (v.), when, for example, idealist historicism makes the subject itself an object of contemplation, thereby closing itself within a vicious circle. criticism (v.), idealism (v.), comes to assert itself as p., according to which the only thing established from the outset is the problem itself, whose legitimacy lies in the irrepressible aspiration to attain the scientific ideal, and whose consistency lies in the situation in which p. places itself, since, while seeking to emerge from it, it does not yet realize that it has definitively emerged from II. Thus p. reaches the depths of criticism skepticism (v.) dogmatism (v.) object (v.) or of the subject (U. Spirito, Il p., Florence 1948, p. 45 ff.). Only the believer, through the “leap” of faith, could “resolve” and close the problem of truth, because the believer draws from the Revelation made by God to believers a content and a criterion
that transcends finiteness (op. cit., pp. 82 ff.). The position of p. does not seem far removed from what Heidegger calls “openness in being,” from the primordial demand to ask, prior to beings and to every synthesis (matter and form, essence and existence, object and subject), what being itself is—the light that illuminates the scene in which the being emerges. In this sense, p. can assume an original positivity without being a system.