Aurelio Pelazza Personal Library

The collection comprises 72 volumes from the library of Aurelio Pelazza (1879–1915), a student of Piero Martinetti and professor of philosophy at the Royal Secondary School in Aosta. Called up for military service at the outbreak of the First World War, he died in combat on 19 July 1915. After his death, the Scientific-Literary Academy of Milan, at the suggestion of Professors Martinetti and Zuccante, purchased his library, which was subsequently divided among the University’s libraries based on subject area. The current collection represents an attempt to virtually reconstruct part of the Pelazza library and, at present, includes all the volumes held at the Biblioteca di Filosofia.

Aurelio Pelazza was the author of several historical essays, focused on a critique of naturalism and empiricism as seen through the works of Shadworth Hodgson, Richard Avenarius and Wilhelm Schuppe. The only work in which Pelazza set out his own thinking directly was his essay on the mechanical conception of nature: La reazione odierna contro la concezione meccanica della natura (1911).

Bibliography by Aurelio Pelazza

• A. Pelazza, La metafisica dell'esperienza. Saggio critico, P. Sajani, 1907
• A. Pelazza, La critica dell'esperienza pura di Riccardo Avenarius, Bocca, 1908
• A. Pelazza, La reazione moderna Contro la concezione meccanica della natura. Memoria comunicata alla società italiana per il progresso delle scienze in Napoli, 15-21 Dicembre 1910, Sandron, 1911
• A. Pelazza, Guglielmo Schuppe e la filosofia dell'immanenza, Libreria Editrice Milanese, 1914

Bibliography on Aurelio Pelazza

• Piero Martinetti Giuseppe Zuccante, L'opera filosofica di Aurelio Pelazza in “Rendiconti del reale istituto lombardo di scienze e lettere" v. 48, (1015), n. 19
• Luca Guzzardi, Lettere di Aurelio Pelazza a Piero Martinetti e a Ernst Mach in “Rivista di Storia della Filosofia”, 60(2005), n.1, pp. 109-125