Ernesto Grassi
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Ernesto Grassi | |
|---|---|
 Professor Grassi at the lectern in Berlin | |
| Born | 2 May 1902 |
| Died | 22 December 1991 (aged 89) |
| Occupation | Philosopher |
Ernesto Grassi (2 May 1902 – 22 December 1991) was an Italian philosopher.
He maintained an intimate friendship with Donald Phillip Verene.[1]
Career and works
Grassi sought to take up the Heideggerean Destruktion of metaphysics, grounding his philosophical enterprise instead in the tradition of rhetoric.[2] He identified the Italian humanist tradition as a potential site to begin this development of philosophy, and his works often contain copious references to the Italian humanists. In this tradition, "work and metaphor are the source of human history and society", an approach to thought which must reject the rational, proceeding as it does from "general and necessary premises."[3]
His work Rhetoric as Philosophy is considered "the first protracted attempt to synthesize Italian humanism with rhetoric, as a source of philosophical invention."[4]
