‘Michele Federico Sciacca, current affairs of a thinker’, conference in Milan

An attentive and rigorous scholar, so much so that he was considered the most significant of the Italian philosophers of the 20th century – we read in a note presenting the event – Sciacca was a teacher, already at a very young age, first in Pavia and then in Genoa. He loved to define himself as a man of school: “Academic no, man of school yes due to my unequivocal vocation to teaching, communication and dialogue… I cannot help but communicate with others, with young people”. Sciacca was the author of around seventy volumes, translated into the main European languages: he felt a need to fertilize spirits, raise problems and feel fertilized by others. A restless soul and thirsty for truth, he found systematicity, clarity and depth in Rosmini’s philosophy. He started from the Rovereto thinker to found his own philosophy of integrality. He recognized the greatness of the Master enough to give him back his rightful place in the broad cultural dialogue of the early twentieth century. He worked boldly on the first centenary of Rosmini’s death, calling the most authoritative exponents of the cultural world of the time; he founded the international center of Rosminian studies in 1966: a place dedicated to in-depth study of Rosminian theory; he established the Rosmini Chair in 1967, to facilitate comparison and dialogue between the philosophy of Rovereto and other philosophies; began the national and critical edition of Rosmini’s published and unpublished works in 1973.

During the conference, nationally renowned speakers will recall his network of personal relationships and friendships with the greatest exponents of the cultural world of the 20th century, and will highlight his many activities, including the foundation and animation of cultural centers that are still flourishing (Stresa, Bolzano and Merano) and scientific journals still in progress today (Giornale di metafisica, Humanitas, Città di Vita, Rivista Rosminiana). Taking inspiration from Sciacca’s thought and legacy, the conference intends to reaffirm the importance of Catholic culture and, more generally, of the dialogue between the Church and the contemporary world, in the panorama of the 20th and 21st centuries. Sciacca, as well as Rosmini and other Catholic thinkers, can constitute an instrument for a ‘bridge’ with modern and postmodern philosophies and thoughts, and with current Western society, the daughter of weak thought, post-humanism and modern atheism.