A Profile of Giovanni Vidari

Abstract

A profile of Giovanni Vidari

Giovanni Vidari (1871-1934) was an Italian philosopher and pedagogist, who studied in the University of Pavia under the guidance of Carlo Cantoni and Luigi Credaro. His formation was influenced by neokantism, on which he grafted pedagogical and psychological interests; he was critical of positivism, while sharing the importance it has given to experience. After teaching in secondary school he was called to the University of Pavia, then of Turin, where he taught Moral Philosophy and later Pedagogy. He was also rector of the Turin university in the years of the first world war, in which he took an active part in patriotic mobilization and worked with the interventionist and war relief associations. Despite having begun his political activity as mayor in radical socialist councils, from about 1910 Vidari had moved toward nationalism, whose roots were in the Risorgimento patriotism, because he believed that socialism favored the disintegration of the country. After war, his relationship with fascism was difficult: he accepted it as a solution to politic and social conflicts, but criticized the Gentile reform of school and some liberticidal measures.

Marginalized by the Turinese exponents of fascism for having signed, in 1925, the manifesto of anti-fascist intellectuals, he took refuge in studies and teaching.  In the following years he attempted however a rapprochement with the fascist regime, in the name of presumed common values, such as the Ideal, the Homeland, Humanity, making a path common to many intellectuals of his generation.