Michele Federico Sciacca

Born July 12, 1908, in Giarre, Catania. Italian idealist philosopher; representative of Christian spiritualism.

Sciacca became a professor in Pavia in 1938 and in Genoa in 1947. He was one of the founders and leaders of the Gallarate movement, a group of Italian Catholic philosophers. Sciacca’s views combine the Platonic and Augustinian tradition with the ideas of A. Rosmini-Serbati and, especially, G. Gentile. At the center of Sciacca’s “philosophy of integralism” is the doctrine that the individual intuitively perceives in his “objective” inner experience the idea of absolute being (god); the idea of god transcends and at the same time is immanent in the individual consciousness. The author of works on the history of philosophy, Sciacca founded in 1946 the journals Giornale di metafisica and Humanitas.