Luigi Pareyson

Luigi Pareyson (Piasco, 1918 – Rapallo, 1991) was one of the leading Italian philosophers of the twentieth century. He studied at the University of Turin, graduating in 1939, and is best remembered for his hermeneutic aesthetics, which challenged the legacy of Benedetto Croce and gave rise to an influential school of thought in Italy.

After studying in Germany with Karl Jaspers, he taught philosophy at a secondary school in Cuneo and then at several universities, until he gained the chair of aesthetics at Turin in 1952. He also founded and edited the Rivista di estetica. His central work, Estetica. Teoria della formatività (1954), presents art as a form that invents its own rule while it is being made. The artwork is less a mere result than an achievement. Later, in Verità e interpretazione (1971), he applied this outlook to truth, understood as personal interpretation rather than objective fact.

Pareyson also wrote on evil, suffering and freedom, as his studies of Dostoevsky and his ontology of freedom, published posthumously, show. His influence reached the Turin School and pupils such as Gianni Vattimo.