Chapter 2 Giovanni Vailati and the Art of Reasoning
Giovanni Maddalena
There are some clichés in the reception of Vailati’s works and there is no more Vailatian exercise than to debunk them; and if it is not possible to do it with his same spirit of wit and lightness, it is hoped to have at least the same force of contents that the philosopher from Crema usually had. The first of these clichés considers Vailati as a precursor of analytic philoso- phy. This interpretation relies on a great number of data and many scholars adhere to it.1 According to this interpretation, Vailati was a pragmatist only in the provisional sense of the term: that is to say, if analytic philosophy had al- ready had a definite development, Vailati would have embraced it. Peirce’s logi- cal pragmatism was the closest theory to propositional analysis and this was the reason for Vailati’s adherence to the Florentine Leonardians’ strange com- panionship. It is thus a “second best choice” in which the thinker from Crema shared his experiences with less valuable fellows because of the lack of other philosophical points of reference matching his logical-mathematical training through which he could challenge the obsolete and parochial Italian culture. The second cliché is that if it is admitted that Vailati was actually an irreduc- ible pragmatist, his pragmatism would belong to the pure “Peircean” type, far from and critical of Papini and Prezzolini’s Nietzschean, occultist, and person- alist vagaries. According to this interpretation in Leonardo there was a coexis- tence of a “good” logical pragmatism, connected to Peirce’s famous pragmatic maxim, and a “bad” pragmatism, of a vague Jamesian ancestry.2 According to this standard two stripes theory, Vailati should be considered as the champion of Peirce’s correct pragmatist thought, with which he shares its settings and content. Finally, there is a last interpretation that sees in Vailati an original thinker, who is also an anticipator of issues, but above all of methods, problems, and
1 Among others we can mention Marcucci (1958), Lanaro (1980), Brodbeck (1963), Facchi (1952), Barone (1963), Cecchinel (1963), Geymonat (1963), and Aqueci (1999). 2 Calderoni first proposed this reading that was continued by Mario Manlio Rossi (1923), Garin (1963), Gullace (1962), Villa (1962), Zanoni (1979), Casini (2002), and many others, including de Waal (2004) among the pragmatist scholars.
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1 Was Vailati an Analytic Philosopher?
Let us start from the argument according to which Vailati is a precursor of ana- lytic philosophy, “forced” to Pragmatism only by necessity. What is analytic in Vailati’s position? A lot. 1) The reduction of some metaphysical and theoretical issues to linguistic problems (S i: 111–115; S ii: 49–74), the sharp distinction between the lin- guistic and ontological level (S i: 137), and the distinction between the theory of meaning and theory of truth (S i: 119). 2) The appreciation for the symbolization of logical relations, for the axi- omatization of sciences, and for the heuristic power of deduction. The latter must be understood in the modern sense of the term. In this issue, Vailati proves to be a good disciple of Peano: mathematics is a more use- ful language because “it is a science in which you never need to know if what you are saying is true, and not even to know what is being talked about” (S i: 7). Russell’s assertion is explained by Vailati in his first article with which he participates in the Leonardo; it is the prelude to the com- parison between the use of axioms and postulates in scientific research and ethics. In “La ricerca dell’impossibile” (S i: 62–63) Vailati distinguish- es sciences that seek purposes from those that search for means, attribut- ing to the former—such as ethics—the power to formulate various pos- tulates to choose from and the need to adapt the means to the choice of