The reasons for holding a conference

Giulio Preti (Pavia, 9 October 1911 - Djerba, 28 July 1972) represents one of the most significant voices of the Italian philosophy of the second half of the nineteenth century at a European level. Trained within the circle of the "Milan school", which was inspired by a thinker and exciter of ideas as Antonio Banfi (the «Italian Cassirer»), Preti soon began to confront himself with the most important philosophical voices of his time, persuing his own philosophical project. This, based on a critical rationalism relating to Kant and Husserl, led him to critically and successfully contaminate different philosophical traditions since his earliest studies. Preti loved the adventures of thought, the conceptual motions, currents and the movements of ideas best, which reveals his constant critical need to very liberally confront himself with various conceptual traditions: from the phenomenology of the early Husserl to the complex tradition of logical empirism (not only the Vienna phase of Carnap, Schlick, Neurath, but also the American period of Hempel, Morris and Strawson), from taking into account Dewey's pragmatism to the critical revaluation of the sensitive-practical dimension that can be found in the early Marx, from studying the thought of a philosopher like Russell (and Wittgenstein too) to focusing on Darwin's evolutionism and its implications with the world of human and effective praxis, from investigating the structures of the world of values (à la Scheler and à la Simmel) to outlining the critical role of reason within the scientific, axiological, ethical, literary and aesthetic field (with studies on Leibniz, Pascal, the Jansenists, Newton, Hume, Schelling, etc.).

The problematic and critical intertwining of these, though different, theoretical expectations has thus constituted, at least over the decades, the privileged horizon of the restless Pretian thought, whose profound roots have Pascalianly been traced out by the philosopher himself within the genesis of Western modernity. This occurred exactly in the seventeenth century, the «iron century», which witnessed the emergence of modern science as well as of the guide-ideas of modern civil society, which would soon establish itself in Europe. Preti did not even limited himself to modernity, since his inquiries into medieval logic (not to speak of ancient stoic logic) allowed him to identify a precious (though not original at all!) carsic history of the phenomenological-logical neorealism, which finally provides Western thought tradition itself with novel and fruitful critical light.

Overall, Preti's reflection has carried out a conceptual shift from the pragmatic reflection on sensitive experience to the phenomenological study of "critical metaphysics" (which is based on the heuristic role of the regional ontologies within the different and autonomous fields of humanistic and scientific knowledge). Preti's thought, his vocation for the bios theoretikós, has indeed never gone through any «epistemological retirement», on the contrary it has always developed according to an intense research programme. Since 1954, however, Preti had been teaching in Florence, living a profound solitude ever more, which was not only existential, but also cultural and theoretical. In such a situation, that is during the Florentine isolation, Preti's homesickness for his Milan (that is for the Banfian and civil Milan, a European city of work and open reflection), has been more and more increasing. This happened exactly because his critical maturation has always developed in deep critical tune with history and the complex (cultural, civil, economic and social) tradition of Lombard regional life. This is indeed a country, a tradition and a civil society with a specific vocation for technological and scientific work, on which (even at the existential level) the Pavese thinker has always drawn the life blood of his own European reflection, which prompted him to confront himself with the most authoritative voices both of the contemporary debate and of the 'high towers' of the history of (ancient, medieval and modern) thought. No accident then if, right in Milan, Preti personally participated in the fight for Liberation to bring the fascist dictatorship down. And, again in Milan, Preti collaborated with the antifascist movement Corrente, with the discussions inspired by Vittorini's Politecnico, with the life of a modest but significant review as La Cittadella of Bergamo, as well as with lots of editorial initiatives (Mondadori, Garzanti, Bompiani, Bocca as well as the precious Edizioni Minuziano, which were then funded by the Varesine company Malerba).

Against such an articulated perspective, Preti is then studied in this conference within the continuity of a precise philosophical tradition – that is the Western tradition of the (Lombard and European) critical rationalism – which will make our (historiographic and theoretical) work the more efficacious, the more it will critically be aware of the living continuity of the tradition within which Preti was trained and operated.

The conference takes place at the University of Insubria, Varese, exactly because the International Insubrian Centre, named after "Carlo Cattaneo" and "Giulio Preti", has the use of the entire archive of the Pavese philosopher's manuscripts, notebooks and unpublished papers. This is the reason why many speeches and contributions will exactly be prompted by some unpublished Pretian works, so as to account for the precise Pretian programme of philosophical research, taking into consideration many aspects, which are inedited, totally unknown or that have not been simply dealt with so far, of his more mature and in-depth philosophical reflection.

This will certainly be a primary novelty of the present symposium, which intends to critically reconstruct the articulated complexity of Preti's philosophical research programme through the analysis of the manifold unknown aspects of his «honest job» of philosophising, which has Banfianly been unravelling with conceptual, moral and civil «obstinate rigour» all the time. This also explains why the symposium has perforce expanded, by considering also the peculiar tradition of the «Milan school», so as to study the links between philosophy, science, literature and poetry as they intermingled in that extraordinary group of Banfi's pupils, which has provided different and diverse fields with original and multifarious contributions.

The critical transversality of this investigation is often entrusted to the voice of new generations of young scholars and various researchers, beside authoritative and well-known scholars and thinkers deriving from different schools of thought. This will allow to better reflect, with a novel critical-prospective slant, enriched by the study of new inedited documents, on the overall vitality of a tradition of thought that, though not excluding discontinuities, "skips" as well as specific "ruptures", has nonetheless developed within the basic critical continuity of a tradition than can now make our own autonomous theoretical and reflection work, our bios theoretikós, more efficacious, at least insofar as the latter is aware, to say it with Preti, of that «living continuity of tradition» which it operates within.