Turin, Vittorio Mathieu, one of the greatest Italian thinkers, died in his country house

The philosopher Vittorio Mathieu, one of the greatest contemporary Italian thinkers, who combined historical interests with original research, especially on the problem of knowledge, died at the age of 96 at his country house in Turin. The author of more than 400 publications on moral philosophy, philosophy of science and aesthetics, Mathieu called himself “a full-time Plotinian who loves to play bridge.”

Born in Varazze (Savona) on December 12, 1923, he was a student of the philosopher Augusto Guzzo at the University of Turin. After graduating, Mathieu embarked on an academic career, beginning in 1956 as a free professor of theoretical philosophy at the University of Trieste; then he became (1961) professor of the history of philosophy first in Trieste and then (1967) at the University of Turin, where since 1973 he has held the chair of moral philosophy. Since 1987 he was a national member of the Accademia dei Lincei and of the Turin Academy of Sciences.

From 1976 to 1980 he was a member and then vice-president of the Executive Council of UNESCO in Paris. From 1994 to 1997 he was the Italian representative in the Advisory Commission of the European Council against racism and xenophobia, established at the summit of the European Union in Corfu. He was a member of the National Bioethics Committee and the Awards Committee of the Balzan Foundation and chaired the Ideazione Foundation.

Among the founding intellectuals of Forza Italia with the sociologist and political scientist Giuliano Urbani, in 1996 with the philosophers Lucio Colletti and Marcello Pera and the historian Piero Melograni, Mathieu was one of the “professors” that Silvio Berlusconi presented in the elections: he ran for the Senate in college of Settimo Torinese but was not elected. His name came into play again in 2005 as a possible president of Rai, at the time when he was president of the internal jurisdictional college of Forza Italia, a position he held even with the birth of the People of Liberty. For more than thirty years Mathieu has been a regular contributor to “Il Giornale”. His latest impressive work is “Treatise on ontology” (Mimesis, 2019), in which Mathieu studies the action of being from below.