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Osservazioni critico-filosofiche contro i materialisti, divise in due trattati ...

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Uncommon anti-materialist work by the Tuscan philosopher Tommaso Moniglia (1686-1767).

Although the ostensible target of Moniglia’s work is Lucretius, and Epicureanism more generally, the focus is a broader one, taking in the materialism of Locke ‘e simili distruttori’, and drawing on the apologetic strategies of Polignac in his Anti-Lucretius, which had first appeared in 1745. Over two treatises, Moniglia discusses the weakness of Lucretius’ views on the rational soul and its immortality, and on the nature of, and possibility of free will, before presenting a series of speculations on logic and the importance of metaphysics; here Moniglia discusses Cartesian doubt and the systems of Leibniz and Wolff, before going on to praise the Port-Royal logic of the Jansenists, and conclude with an examination of Helvetius’ recently appeared L’Esprit.

Moniglia was professor of philosophy at Pisa; as a student, he spent three years in England, where he encountered the work of Locke, then little known in Italy; his writings include the 1744 Dissertazione contro i fatalisti, in which he sought to temper Lockean empiricism with traditional Catholic teaching.

OCLC records copies at Cambridge and the British Library, with a copy also at Toronto.

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