| Summary: | The factors contributing to the philosophical formation of M. F. Sciacca are many, but none is so important as the history of philosophy. Sciacca's reflections on this discipline, which antedated by many years his acceptance of the chair of theoretical philosophy in Genoa, obliged him to abandon modern idealism, to criticize Italian neo-scholasticism and to place himself philosophically in the line of Plato, Augustine and Rosmini. Granting the importance of the history of philosophy in the elaboration of the personal philosophy of our thinker, a developed description of the structure of this same history of philosophy, according to his views, becomes indispensable. The whole process of human philosophical thinking is conceived by the Sicilian philosopher as the simultaneous progress of three main currents: sophist, aristotelian, and platonic. According to our interpreter, the sophists perpetuate themselves in modern philosophy from Descartes to the existentialists and others, the Aristotelians reappear in the Scholastics of modern times and in the neothomists of our own day. Both sophist and aristotelian schools are criticized by him. Only the line of thought inaugurated by Plato, continued by Augustine and in modern times by Rosmini and Blondel, is for him the representative of truth and of deep philosophical reflection. Here he has found his philosophical identity, and his pilosophy is only a new development of the germinal truths expounded by his predecessors. Nevertheless, the philosophy of Sciacca results in a synthesis of modern thought (mainly idealism) and classical philosophy (in the form of Christian aristotelianism). From the « sophist » current he has taken interiority as a point of departure for philosophical reflection, the dialectical structure of reality (in the form of complicancy and implicancy and the requirement of vertical rigor in analysis). From aristotelian thought, he has appropriated the trend to objectivity and transcendency with its incontrovertible distinction between finite and infinite being. But the hearth of his philosophy is the original intuition of being as idea, which, given to man by God, constitutes man's essential self and makes of him a synthesis of finite existent being and infinite idea (through which he is able to know God and to aspire to infinite ideals). From this foundation rises the « philosophy of integrality », which represents the final and definitive stage of the thought of Sciacca. This Sicilian thinker is the most relevant christian philosopher of Italy today.
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