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Giorgio Fano (Trieste, 17 April 1885 - Siena, 20 September 1963) was an Italian philosopher.

He was an Italian neo-idealist thinker; he belonged to that group of artists, and writers,  who made famous the Trieste of the early twentieth century. He commented the work of Croce and Gentile in an original way. In particular, he stressed the importance of the natural sciences and mathematics, which are not governed by pseudo-concepts in his system. He also gave great importance to the simplest and most basic aspects of the spiritual life inspired by the reflections of Gianbattista Vico.

BIOGRAPHY

Giorgio Fano was born in Trieste on 17 April 1885. His father Guglielmo was a well-known doctor, his mother Amalia Sanguinetti, who for many years was seriously ill, died when he was still a child. His father Guglielmo was one of the few Jews of the time who converted to Catholicism for sincere faith. But this conversion was accompanied by religious delusions and early mental disorders.

Youth and interaction with the Julian intellectuals (i.e. belonging to Venezia Giulia).

Ever since adolescence Fano has had an impulse of revolt against the adults, their conformism, their oppressive spirit, or at least the heavy atmosphere established by them. Rebel boy, he did not want to accept school discipline; a small episode distinguishes his character, when he threw the class register into the stove. He attended Austrian schools of the time with little profit; he affirmed that part of his difficulties was due to the fact that he had little memory (not the conceptual one, in which he excelled, but the specific, detailed one, necessary for example in the study of history and geography). So he left his studies long before he finished the Senior High School.

Accordino to Giorgio Voghera, an italian writer, we read (“Il Piccolo” , January 4, 1995): "Retired from school, his relatives got him a good office job. - But he abandoned the job without saying anything to anyone and took, along with some peers, a small room for rent on the hill of Scorcola. There he devoted himself not only to endless discussions with friends (and perhaps to some amorous meeting), but spent hours and hours reading, almost without any guide and taking notes in large quantities, the classics of philosophy: ill-fed, cold and often short of sleep - just "fami, cold and vigilie", as Dante says. - And the in-depth, integral reading of the classics continued later in Vienna as well, where he could hear the lectures of some luminaries of the time. It was the reading of the German classics, from Leibniz to Schopenhauer - and, of course, particularly of Kant, Fichte and Hegel - to give his thought an address to which, even in the undoubted originality of his own developments, he would remain faithful to lifetime. And I would not like to exclude the fact that the great fascination exercised on him by the major exponents of German criticism and idealism was due to the fact that he believed that he found in them weapons for his personal battle against dogmatism, fideism, clericalism of his family environment. Anyway, this young rebel, often reckless in decisions concerning practical life, sometimes even unresponsive to people he did not like, showed from the beginning, in the field of philosophical thought, a seriousness, I would say almost prudence,  a desire to deepen questions and to document himself, which are rarely found today even in mature scholars. "

The exceptional environment of Trieste at the time also contributed to the formation of Fano; in particular, he was friend of Umberto Poli, whose pseudonym, Saba, was invented by him. In the above mentioned article by Giorgio Voghera we read the following passage which describes the type of relationship that existed between Saba and Fano:

"Fano was an incurable optimist, jovial, brave, he invented jokes that sometimes embarrassed Saba. His vision of the world was somehow transfigured and often naive. The following episode, authentic, shows what kind of jokes, quite bold, Fano subjected his friend: Fano and Saba young walk by the sea; they discuss animatedly about the existence of God. At one point Fano collects, hiding his fist, a piece of wood and exclaims: "If God exists, let this stone float! ", And then throws the piece of wood into the sea, which naturally remains afloat. Saba, very excited, thinks of the possibility of a miracle, brings his hand to the heart and says breathlessly: "My God, Giorgio, Giorgio ..." "

The sixth poem in the collection of poems entitled  the "Prigioni" by Saba is also inspired by the figure of Fano: "The passionate.

/ Nature, because I burn, it has covered my cheeks and the red-haired chin. The spirit is not a breeze: it is a rushing wind, so even the Fate is shaken. /...../ I was Moses who brought you from Egypt, / and I suffered for you on the cross. / They call me in Arabia Muhammad. "

Saba and Fano bought together the "Ancient and Modern Bookstore",  but they did not get along because Saba was  a lover of ancient books, while Fano had a different approach. Fano was not a person to diligently take on too many "boring" tasks, but used to download them cheerfully on the others. So the two decided to separate, and leave the property of the "Bookstore" to only one of the two. Since both wanted to remain owners, Fano proposed to play this right head or cross, and won. At this point Saba did not accept the verdict of fate and, showing himself desperate, tried to persuade his friend to leave him the  library, and Fano gave in.

Another person from the Trieste area with whom Fano had great friendship was Virgilio Giotti. Fano writes (*): "Our meeting was like a Tuscan artist with a Jewish prophet. I was very happy with it. At that time he read Zola, Maupassant and Flaubert that I did not know. Because of his indolent character, in many outer things of life he did what I advised him. He came away from Trieste, then he brought his family to Florence, and the like. " But the friendship between the two suffered a tremendous backlash due to the dramatic events involving Maria, sister of Virgilio Giotti, who Fano married in 1913; they had a mentally impaired son, who was later killed by his mother, who then

committed suicide. This was a tragedy that then deeply shook the Trieste social environment.

Studies and teachings.

During the period of the First World War he was irredentist like many of his friends, Benco, Saba, Giotti, Schiffrer and others (irredentists were a group of citizens of Trieste who, durino WWI, wanted Italy to win the war so that Trieste would become part of Italy instead of being part of Austria, as it was at the time). Later his attitude was very similar to that of Benedetto Croce, and for similar ideological reasons. The egalitarian ideals did not take hold of him, and it seemed to him utopian and in any case undesirable, to establish a communist society. Indeed, in the years immediately after the First World War he firmly opposed the maximalist and turbulent socialism of that time; this led him  to demonstrate, for a brief period, a certain understanding for the Fascism.  But this attitude changed quickly: even before Croce, Giorgio Fano became a courageous and irreducible antifascist, who lost no opportunity to openly express his opinions. These position statements could not be without consequences; in this regard we read what the Biographical Dictionary Treccani writes:

"Professor of Philosophy at various high schools in Trieste since 1925, Fano aspired, however, to university teaching, which came after many troubles caused by obstacles placed by the authorities. The reason for these difficulties was due to the reputation of antifascist consequent to a speech that he delivered commemorating his cousin Enrico Elia, a volunteer in the great war who died on Podgora in 1915; in this speech it was revealed, in a not very veiled way, the belief that the sacrifice of many lives for freedom was denied by the then dominant political regime. This political choice took him a few days in jail in the fortress of Koper and his reputation as an antifascist had negative effects in his university career. "

Fano graduated in philosophy cum laude in Padua in 1923, with a thesis with the original title "Of the universe or of myself: essay of a solipsistic philosophy" (the theory that only the self exists). The thesis  was then published in 1926 on the Rivista d'Italia. Probably he did not attend university classes in Padua, partly because he was already married and had to provide for his family.  His university education was achieved, as well as in Vienna, in Florence where he had spent a few years before the war, and where he had attended the environment of La Voce.

Voghera writes. "Of great ability to use the Socratic method in teaching, it is no wonder that he was a teacher of particular value: the best I have ever known, I would dare to say. In Trieste he lectured for a few years in high schools, before moving to Rome. But some of my peers who had him as a teacher, never ceased to tell me the surprise they had when, after listening Fano,  they suddenly realized that philosophy - that indigestible jumble of empty, abstruse and complicated concepts -  became something extremely fascinating and current, even fun. Needless to say, all the pupils were enthusiastic about him and almost all schoolgirls were in love with him. "

Fano was scholar of Croce, whom he had known since 1912; he published various articles on Croce's philosophy [1]; one of his articles, entitled "The negation of philosophy in current idealism" (1932), brought him the attention of Giuseppe Lombardo Radice, who offered him a position as a voluntary pedagogical assistant at the faculty of magisterium of the University of Rome where Fano moved with his new family. It should be noted that his first book in which his thought was organically exposed, "The dialectical system of the spirit" appeared only in 1937, when he was already 52 years old. In 1938, because of the racial laws, he was turned away from university teaching; he succeeded however in maintaining a position as a professor at the Military School of Rome;

Last years and research on the origin of language.

After the German invasion successive to September 8, 1943, Fano found refuge in Rocca di Mezzo, in Abruzzo where he remained for almost a year. The quiet security, the courage, the carelessness of dangers, never failed him, neither regarding the risk of being discovered by the Germans (he and his wife had falsified the identity cards) nor for the allied bombings. Indeed, in the long winter of 1943-44 the German often used it as an interpreter. Since his house was right on the main road, often the kitchen was full of soldiers who needed something. There, in that ill-heated kitchen, regardless of the immediate risks, he worked perhaps more than he had ever done before and completed an important work: "The philosophy of the Croce. Essay of criticism and early features of a dialectical system of the spirit", which was then published in 1946. We recall here an episode that illustrates well both the importance that he attached to his work andhis courage, his temerity, let's say almost his unconsciousness:

"One morning, coming down - in the kitchen, which had become his studio, he found it invaded by German soldiers who were looking for water and more. And then, with his usual calm tone, forgetting who he was dealing with, he the Jew, with his face as a biblical prophet, he pointed to the Wehrmacht soldiers the door: "Please," he said in German, "if the gentlemen had the pleasure of going somewhere else. I would have to work. Without a word the soldiers pushed the door and he quietly went back to his work table to fight with Croce, forgetting that the most superficial investigation would have been enough to convoy him with his family towards the extermination camps. "

When the war ended, he regained his position at the University of Rome, and even for a brief period he also held the temporary appointment of director of the Institute of Pedagogy of the Magisterium; however Fano  did not bother to obtain a stable accommodation, so much so that at the end of  his academic career he was not even entitled to have a pension. - On the other hand he worked continuously for almost twenty years, until his death, completing other relevant essays. In the aforementioned essay on Croce he had claimed the importance of the empirical sciences, which in Croce's philosophy had no cognitive dignity. In the text "Eastern Theosophy and Greek Philosophy" we find a description of the historical development of human thought, in which, among other things, the importance of mathematics is claimed, while Croce maintained that mathematics was a "pseudo-concept".

Finally his research led him to examine the problem of the origin of language, on which he had some original and important insights; - his thought is expressed in the book  "Essay on the origins of language. With a critical history of the glottogonic doctrines ".The essay was then re-edited, in a more complete form, as it was in its intentions, in the text "Origins and nature of language" by his wife Anna and son Guido.

He died in Siena on September 20, 1963, while he presided over a board of examiners.

[1] L’estetica nel sistema di B. Croce, L'Anima, December 1911; la filosofia of B. Croce, Giornale critico della filosofia italiana, 1928.

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