RAVAISSON, FÉLIX. - French philosopher, b. at Namur (Belgium) on 23 Oct. 1813, d. at Paris on 18 May 1900. An independent spirit, he did not align himself among the followers of Cousin (v.), who at that time dominated French academic circles, and he never obtained a university chair. He carried on his activity in public offices as a functionary of the Ministry of Education.
A pupil of Schelling (v.) at Munich, he felt his influence, together with that of Maine de Biran (v.) and of Aristotle (v.), studied later in the Essai sur la métaphysique d'Aristote (2 vols., Paris 1837-46; partial Italian translation edited by A. Tilgher, Florence 1922), which, although it remained incomplete, is a work of considerable value. Other notable writings, the essay De l'habitude (Paris 1858; subsequent editions) and the Rapport sur la philos. en France au XIXe siècle (ibid. 1868); edited by C. Devivaise, Testament et fragments (ibid. 1932). For R. (as for Schelling), there is at the bottom of the universe a principle that is spontaneous creative activity, organizing reality, of which mechanical necessity is only a secondary and superficial manifestation. The fault of positivism (v.) is that it does not take into account this free and creative principle, which is discovered in things, in us and in God: in nature as dispersed, in us as concentrated in the personality and in the unity of consciousness, in God as supreme perfection and absolute order. God is a person and his perfection shines in the world, but his existence cannot be rationally demonstrated nor his nature known. God is grasped through an inner intuition (Biran) and through immediate intuition of the beauty and harmony of the universe.
R. is linked, through Schelling, to the scholastic tradition and constructs a metaphysics of an intuitionist and anti-intellectualist character that would influence both the contingentism of Boutroux and the intuitionism of Bergson.
Bibliography5 works
Michele Federico Sciacca