La "mente meravigliosa" di Cartesio e l'"ingegno bellissimo" di Pascal nella riflessione rosminiana sull'Io e il pensiero

The main topic of this article concerns Rosmini’s critical approach to Descartes and Pascal’s accounts of the first principles of thought. In the first part, I provide a brief sketch of Rosmini’s interpretation and revision of Descartes’ cogito as described in Meditations on First Philosophy. For Rosmini, the Cartesian claim ego cogito, ergo sum cannot be the first principle of philosophy because it expresses only an act of cognitive reflection presupposing a more fundamental evidence, namely being and its undeniable intelligibility. In addition, Descartes’ human ego seems to be a denial of the ontological unity of human being, because it seems to be able to exist without its body. In the second part, I discuss Rosmini’s criticism of Pascal’s doctrine on first principles. According to Rosmini, Pascalian first principles (space, time, movement, matter) are nothing more than the first data of experience. Only the idea of “being” – a notion which Pascal also considers undefinible because self–evident –, is apodictically necessary, while the first data of experience are hypothetically necessary, depending on God’s free will. Rosmini agrees with Descartes and Pascal on the crucial importance of thought for describing the human ego, but he also argues that a proper analysis of the human cognitive act should reveal the priority of the evidence of being. Furthermore, he emphasises the importance of considering the human ego as a being composed of a spiritual and a corporeal dimension. For this reason, according to Rosmini, the Cartesian cogito, ergo sum is true only if understood as an expression of the fundamental feeling, that is, the pre–reflective consciousness of the existence of our ego as a spiritual and corporeal entity.