Post World War II
Following World War II, the social and economic crisis in Italy contributed to the decline of the theories of Croce and Gentile. A new generation of intellectuals rejected neo-idealism, attacking its ambiguous cultural categories and sterile antinaturalistic, antiscientific polemics. In this climate, a dialog emerged among proponents of various ideologies including neopositivist philosophy, developed in Vienna by Moritz Schlich and Rudolf Carnap, the early ideas of Ludwig Wittgenstein, and the mathematical logic of Bertrand Russell. This led to the formation of a neo-enlightenment movement (Dal Pra and Minazzi 1992), with the participation most notably of Ludovico Geymonat (1908–1991) and Giulio Preti (1911–1972). Geymonat and Preti—through numerous studies, books, translations, and reviews— critically introduced neopositive issues into Italian thinking, arguing both the cultural value of science and the importance of technology.
Geymonat, beginning with his Studies for a New Rationalism (1945), delineated a neo-enlightenment philosophy centered in the philosophy of science, logic, and the history of science and technology, arguing for replacement of static with dynamic studies of scientific theories. Geymonat became, in 1956, the first Italian to hold a chair in philosophy of science (at the University of Milan) and, in 1974, to win the Médaille Koyré for history of science, awarded by the Académie Internationale d'Histoire des Sciences in Paris.
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