Is the Existenzphilosophie dead or has it not yet finished its task? The actuality of existentialism according to Luigi Pareyson

Abstract

This article presents Luigi Pareyson’s interpretation of the philosophy of existence as it unfolds in the philosophical context of the Kierkegaard Renaissance in Germany in the 1930s. Pareyson conceives it as a “philosophy of crisis”, that is, a type of thought that raises the problematic status of the human condition because of freedom, which allows man to choose between opposing and sometimes irreducible alternatives. In the opinion of the Italian philosopher, this is the case represented, respectively, by fideism and by the secularization of thought, which constitute, he says, the deepest and most rooted historical fruits of the crisis of Hegelianism up to the present day. In this panorama we also approach the ontological personalism developed by the master from Turin, from which he develops his philosophical interpretation of these contemporary problems.