Le avventure dell'idealismo giuridico italiano. Da Igino Petrone a Felice Battaglia

The thesis aims at examining the idealistic renaissance of Italian Philosophy of Law, which happened between the end of Nineteenth century and the beginning of Twentieth one. Hence, the fundamental objective of the thesis is to illustrate the debate about the transcendental category of Law, which was firstly defended by Igino Petrone’s La fase recentissima della filosofia del dritto in Germania (1895). This philosophical peroration, culminated in Petrone’s work titled Il diritto nel mondo dello spirito (1910), was thus opposed by two prominent Italian Neo-Hegelian thinkers, Benedetto Croce and Giovanni Gentile, who indeed reduced the value of Law to other spiritual guises, either Economic one or Moral one. However, the Italian idealism was not consisting in Neo-Hegelianism only, also including Neo-Kantianism, both logicist, represented by Giorgio Del Vecchio, and of value, represented by Adolfo Ravà. The thesis especially considers Del Vecchio’s though, according to whom the concept of Law was merely a mental form, although Immanuel Kant had not actually believed that practical principle of Law could be an intellectual category as the theoretical ones were instead. Neo-Kantian view of Jurisprudence was therefore judged transcendent by Actualist thinkers, particularly by Del Vecchio’s leading pupil, Felice Battaglia, whose Diritto e filosofia della pratica (1931) tried to reform both Croce’s nexus of concrete distincts and Gentile’s dialectic of contradictory, in order to save the immanentistic guise of Law from aforementioned Neo-Hegelian dissolutions. Following Battaglia’s mental itinerary, started in the Twenties, the thesis besides demonstrates that Calabrese philosopher’s conversion to Christian Spiritualism was not a totally abjuration of his former Actualism. The thesis also discusses the three-task theory of Philosophy of Law that distinguished the logical task, aiming at defining the concept of Law, from the phenomenological one, which was a sort of Philosophy of Legal History, and deontological one, which speculated on value of Justice.