Carlo Tamagnone

Carlo Tamagnone (Turin, 1937) is an Italian philosopher. After scientific studies he embraced those humanistics conjugating these with those. Achieved a bachelor in letters it has then oriented definitively its interests towards the philosophy, taking care itself also of cultural anthropology, psychoanalysis and cognitive sciences. Some his meaningful words:

In all cases where the atheism became dogmatic, with principles and ethics, making a distinction between good and evil, setting some behavioral precepts, has taken on the form of a religion. It is a contradiction in terms: atheism can not be forced because it is in itself metaphysical freedom and metaphysical freedom is the mother of all freedoms
The religion is winner because atheism has always take it as a reference point to fight; so it has always been an attitude of protest and not at all of theoretical proposal.
(Passages of an interview to Radio Vaticana, november 2005)

Tamagnone specifically fights the metaphysics, because he sees it as artificial and hoaxser thought, that uses devastating the true philosophy for a very long time. In the La filosofia e la teologia filosofale he named it just philosophal theology and not philosophical.
A typical assertion of this philosopher is : “I wish an atheism of proposal and not of protest” which from the half of '90 ran its searches toward materialism and atheism, of which it has become an historical and theoretical philosopher. His works were only published after 2004, but he became immediately a point of reference of the philosophical atheism “hard” as basically theoretical.
Between the several comments on the thought of Tamagnone here two meaningful: a) that one of a not atheist philosopher and b) that one of an atheist etno-anthropologist:
«It is this complex and problematic plurilevel frame which, in my opinion, is the background to the effort of Carlo Tamagnone, in his Needs and freedom that in the title, classic and challenging, reflecting centuries of philosophical debate and questions for rewords many open and unresolved. The necessity and freedom are, by the author, the categories through which to read the whole reality, a reality that is plural and irreducible to one, but not limited to, freedom and necessity are also articulated the real life, of reality - hence, also, the plural of it - taking into account which is found not feasible, hearing wrong, a monistic approach, typical of all metaphysics and of every religion, in its declinations idealistic or dogmatic materialistic-radical . The vision of the work of Tamagnone is prospective: it defines a new hermeneutic that breaking, emancipated, materialism derives from the metaphysical, "dead", "vulgar", "religious", thanks to an enhancement of the existential and experiential components that you understand or not, are indispensable in every path of knowledge, since the point of initiation and development of any knowledge that can not move from a question of the subject question, that question is innervated in our lives and experience them.»
(Fabio Bazzani (Department of Philosophy - University of Florence) Book review of March 2004 to "Necessity and liberty")
«Carlo Tamagnone has set itself a challenging goal: to write a history of atheism in philosophical encyclopaedic character. No previous effort, apart from the work of Fritz Mauthner (however restricted the West ). Scientifically rigorous in not wanting to dig deep, thereby avoiding arbitrary attribute beliefs to those who left us literature suggests otherwise, the approach is the same as his previous work, philosophy and theology Philosopher. The author is relentless in denouncing not only "false" religion, but also what, in his view, atheists are only partial, as the expression of a thought yet deeply imbued with determinism, "a super-faith stronger than any other faith "which, however, must wait for Darwin to be criticized as it should be. Obviously, this approach, they are very few philosophers who pass "the test": they can not La Mettrie, Helvétius, d'Holbach, and even less Sade, whose misadventures are hardly a historical intellectuals with no mercy.»

(Raffaele Carcano (UAAR - Rome), book review of the November the 2008 to the "The Enlightenment and the rebirth of the philosophical atheism")
Philosophy
The thought of Tamagnone develops four classical aspects philosophy: ontological, gnoseological, existential and historiiographical. We can say that in first it places the question “what is the truth? ”, in according to “as it can be known? ”, in the third party “as it affects the life of the man” and at last “as it has been seen through the millenia”. Regarding the ontology the departure point is the ontological pluralism, according with the anthropic real dualism, as esperiential dualism of the human existence.
For how much this thinker places itself in directed antithesis with the religious concept, in specific way he fights the concepts of metaphysics, that he sees to be always artificial and deceiver, therefore escapes to the definition of antireligious. He assumed in fact such specifically critical position regarding the metaphysical in general terms and in idealistic speculation in particular. In the test “The philosophy and the philosophal theology”, exited in 2007, it leads a lock out surveying on the metaphysical thought (from he redefined just “philosophal theology”) and the metaphysical concept of God-Necessity (ex. Spinoza) comes to place side by side itself to that one of God-Will of the monotheisms.
In such work a philosophical atheism finds its cleaner expression that has historically not had many assertors. The historical atheism in fact has mostly been characterized for that it fights more than for that it proposes. A typical assertion of this philosopher is in fact that it must be gone towards: “an atheism of proposal and of protest” and is not only this the reason for which it is not a detractor of the religion, but if not of the metaphysics, whose procedures it thinks deeply deceiver for the philosophy.
From the half of the 90' years his searches have been concentrated on the materialism and the atheist thought, of which it has become historical and theoretical important, with works only published after 2004, but that they have become a point of reference of the philosophical atheism “hard” and of that “theoretical”. This characterizes him as atheist thinker is the fact to have abandoned the merely antireligious attitude in order to privilege instead that of proposal. At the same time he moved the polemic target of his theoretical atheism from the religion to the metaphysics (the “philosophal theology”) that it considers the true matrix of the gnoseological mystification in philosophy. It thinks that the abandonment of every form of theology involves the opening of a new horizon whether gnoseologic or existential, that it expresses itself like “metaphysical freedom” and that is unfolded in the immanence.
He has written in the preface of “Philosophical atheism in the ancient world (pag.9): «The philosophical elimination of the concept of God actually goes very beyond the atheism profession; it, if is deeply thematized, can give rise to a kind of rebirth to the existence, like projected subjects “metaphysically freed” and therefore in an opened horizon, where the binding turn out to break all chains of hypothetical and binding “transcendence”, from which we would depend from the beginning and that it would permeate to us in the deep one.”
Also be a matter itself of a declared atheist thinker, it has proposed itself like assertor of an anti-dogmatic Postmaterialism, based on a fundamental ontological pluralism that does not have to never close the ontological and gnoseological horizons, but always to leave them open to the new one of the discovery.
Theoretical foundations
That of Tamagnone connotes it like a philosophy atheist and anti-metaphysical, strongly influenced from the physical and biological contemporary sciences. The scientific element, or also like background cultural going back to its youth, is still strongly present in his present considerations. Especially on the ontological level the consideration on the contemporary physical is much intense one, on the model of much contemporary Anglo-Saxon philosophy to which this philosopher is much careful one.
The connection to the historical atheisms is characterized from his radical indeterminism, that places him than it on the line of Leucippus and Epicure, but not of Democritus. Regarding the enlightenment atheisms it refers itself to La Mettrie and Diderot, not to Helvétius and Holbach. The recent dense and wide book (2 volumes for 1052 pages) “The Enlightenment and the rebirth of the philosophical atheism” analyze deeply the warning signs eighteenth atheism and the several forms by it assumed.
The theoretical proposals regard two main lines. A first ontological and gnoseological, that he calls “onto-physical pluralism”, a second existentialistical called “real anthropic dualism” (of the human experience dualism in the reality). In “Necessity and liberty”, published in 2004, the ontological pluralism is placed but not developed, it is the real anthropic dualism. The author declares that the formulation of both to go up to consideration of years 1995-96. The element strongly physicist of the supposed general “ontological pluralism” (concerning “onto-physical pluralism” + “real anthropic dualism”) is the object of a new text on-line entitled “From the nothing to the reality becoming”.
Although this thinker has not still published complex works with regard to, strong are his ethical interests, for the time being only object of short articles on the review “L’Ateo” (“The Atheist), among them “Reflections for an atheist ethics” (January 2003) and “Androcracy: infamy and imbecillity (April 2006). In the first one it comes proposed an ethics of the absolute freedom, with the only limit not to bring damage to some in whatever form. The second is an energetic one and gotten passionate execration of the overbearingness and the arrogance of the male regarding the female.
Ontology
The ontology of Tamagnone is characterized by an irreducible anti-metaphysical attitude, because he sees metaphysics as deceiver. For him it start always from premises nearly always invented and without any true report with reality, using logical-dialectical tools and ad hoc. It creates therefore arbitrary hypostases groundless. He comes thus carried out from the metaphysician (defined also philosophal theologians) because they make “jumps” philosophically illegitimate from the logical-dialectic level to that ontological one. On the base of such theses this thinker denies validity to any ontology based on metaphysical principles and he proposes another rigorously in agreement with the physical one. Only this is legitimized to give foundations of ontology and allows it to evolve on the wave of the scientific progress.
Those which it judges metaphysical mystifications become therefore the primary target of the opposition that he leads, associating the religion, that he calls “cultish theology”, to the metaphysics, the “philosophal theology”. This adjective, drawn from the Renaissance alchemy, alludes to the illusory and intrinsically esoteric character of the creation of the concepts by metaphysicians, of whom it calls only a “thought” and that opposes to the “real” one. From this come also his reservation in the use of the term “truth”, that he judges strongly compromised with the metaphysics too much, and therefore proposes its substitution with that one of “reality” (distinguishing a cosmic reality and an anthropic reality). The word “truth” is for Tamagnone legitimate only when used in mathematics, in the logic, and in the fields ethical and legal. Not in any other fields, above all philosophic, because it always risks to produce to hard mystifications, automatically falseness.
The ontological attitude of Tamagnone is rather complicated, because on one side it has merely physical bases, but for another assuming a general “ontological pluralism” including the dualism of anthropical reality, that theorizes that the reality made not only of “matter”, but also by other reality. It places in fact beside that one a second cosmic real concerning man that he calls “aither”, the basic principle of the “real anthropic dualism”, accompanying it with a mental function, the “idema” (the core of individuality), that it would able to perceiving and translate it in affections and in feelings, aesthetical, ethical and cognitive. Tamagnone supports that the aiteria is real, because “effectual”, maker of changes in the human behaviors not due to the matter, neither to biological necessities, neither to sociability, but only concerning the individuality. The conciliation of the materiality and the biology with the affections and feelings with the individual feeling (that for he is not at all identifying with thinking) places serious problems, that at the moment do not seem completely resolved. Because the conciliation of the real anthropic dualism with the ontophysic pluralism (object of the recent “From the nothing to the becoming of the reality”) appears enough precarious and not completely convincing.
The sphere of the physical one is founded for Tamagnone on two main pillars, the pluralism and the indeterminism, 1st because he thinks to be the elementary particles to have created “whole” of the universe, more or less as Leucippus theorized with atoms, and 2nd because it denies that the cosmos has been born and evolves deterministically. The presence in cosmogonic and cosmologic processes whether of the case or the necessity they confirm for he a vision in which determinism and indeterminism they are not opposed, but conjugated in an ontic probabilism that pilots the cosmic evolution to all the levels of the being. A being that according to Tamagnone is always a becoming, where every entity like the whole are self-transformed, and transforming itself they trace evolutionary ways and create structures and systems. With this he extends two principles that already had been placed from Jacques Monod in “The case and the necessity” for the living world, but that Tamagnone borrows and extends (rather bravely) to all the being, with considerations not always in agreement with the physics.
The ontological pluralism
The ontologic pluralism is an advanced theoretical hypothesis from Tamagnone of ‘90 years that comes in an idea of the “reality” much more vast, deep and plural than our experiences and our thought can make to think us. While the spiritual “truths” hypostatized by the metaphysics are excluded, he theorized that the matter is not the only real of whole, but only one of many form of reality. Other realities therefore together it, but outside from our experiential and cognitive horizons.
The ontophysical pluralism
In the last work “From the nothing to the becoming of the reality” Tamagnone develops his philosophical point of view about the Quantum Mechanics and the physical Standard Model that has the BigBang as its foundation.
Gnoseology
The knowing problem is dominant in this philosopher and covers all its work; such gnoseological element has a deep bond with contemporary science (especially biology, theoretical physics and cosmology), but it is considered in critical way and nothing at all scientific. The philosopher examines the ways with which the knowing of the reality is possible, or at least knowable of it; accepting the objective limits that the vastness and the complexity of the universe places. Limits that metaphysics is not placing because “it invents” and “it manufactures” a nonexistent truth, ad hoc, but after demonstrate it skillfully with logical and dialectic formalisms formally correct, but gnoseologically incorrect. The metaphysics is also that instrument that through the centuries has worked like a good wetnurse and upkeeper of the religion. From this point of view Tamagnone thinks that the Platonism and the Aristotelianism very properly have married with the Christianity, making of the official Christian doctrine which is from the IV century on.
The knowledge, founded on the intellectual honesty and the corrected cognitive approach, from a part, and instead the faith (of the cultural theology) and the dialectic logical artifice (of the phylosophal theology), are opposing two conflictual and incompatible ways of the human thought and attitude in front of the reality. The approach to the real one is therefore, without average measures, either philosophical or theological. According to Tamagnone the theology has two sides, the faithful and cultural represented from the religion, and the speculative and a logical-dialectic one, represented by the metaphysics: just “cultural theology” the first, “philosophical theology” the second. This is sell explained in the preface of “The philosophy and the phylosophal theology” (pages 7-17).
The ontological knowledge must adhere itself to the “physical datity” in its to reveal itself like object of knowing analyzable, confirming and reproducing. The religion “believes” in the revelation and of it makes a foundation that makes useless and superfluous rational searching, while the metaphysics creates imaginary entities and false ontological models. The it makes a posteriori them as demonstrated true through surreptitious and deceived logical-dialectic procedures. With that Tamagnone denunciation the improper, but solid use along all the history of the philosophy, two fundamental instruments of the philosophy, logic and the dialectic one, but that if been used to ideological targets from the metaphysics they have become true instruments of mystification.
Exa-functional Mind (Philosophy of Mind)
Tamagnone developed a philosophy of mind based on six bonded but different functions, which was later called Hexa-functional Mind. Such theory of the human mind and its functions has been developed in Necessity and liberty (chapter VIII). The philosopher sees the mind's structure as a polyfunctional system , constituted from six fundamental functions that it calls mental organizations and infrastructures . The operations of the mind would be the result of the way with they are working to produce thought, feelings, intuitions, emotions. The organizations are four: the psyche, the intellect, the reason and the idema (the core of individuality). The infrastructures are the consciousness and the memory.
The great problems is that we have very often irrational behaviours because ruled prevalently by psyche. Tamagnone whrote:
The mind can be considered a physiologically homogeneous system, but not homogeneous and nor unifiable are its functions. They express themselves in different functional organizations, and sometimes at odds with neural-synaptic configurations changing and evolving. In Necessity and liberty we noted that among the four functional organizations (psyche, intellect, reason and idema) is always the psyche driving and dominating our mind. The psyche leads the game psycho-somatic and the body follows it, but the intellect (as intuitive function), the reason (as computational-analytical function) and the idema (as nucleus of individuality concerning feelings) can limit its pressure in production of thought. C.Tamagnone, La filosofia e la teologia filosofale, 2007, p. 89
Ethics
The ethical thought of this philosopher can be synthesized like a radical “ethics of the freedom”, in the sense that the freedom of thought and the freedom of action (with the obvious restrictions of legal character) are placed as inalienable bases of every not ideological ethics. Uphill them is, in the opinion of Tamagnone, what he defines “metaphysical freedom”, because he (as atheist declared) thinks that own of the religion) think needing break all bonds not only with religious transcendence but also with every metaphysical hypostases.
In such way the concept of human freedom, subject to the liberation of the man from every metaphysical lace, acquires a meaning that in opinion of Tamagnone would go beyond the freedom of thought and action in civil sense, in order to become an existential base towards new horizons of realization of the individuality of every human being.
Aesthetics
The aesthetic of Tamagnone develops itself starting from two different feelings, the “sense of tragic” and the “sense of comic” as described in “Necessity and liberty” (§§ 6.3 and 13.3) The sense of the tragic is the consciousness of the fact that the man is for its nature condemned to the suffering, to the death and to the ignorance. Any thing the man can make in order to render his existing easier and rewarding (apart having to die), he cannot escape from a suffering that is in ambush to every angle. It is moreover dysimmetric (dis-symmetric) regarding the pleasure and its possibilities of realization, because these are always enormously in intensities and duration more limited for (and from this the existentive dysimmetry between pain and pleasure).
The comic come out, in opinion of this philosopher, when happens a sot of short-circuit between the necessity, as closing, and the liberty, as opening, rushing unexpected in some situation opening a new horizon of signification. The comic is then like a sudden explosion of liberty in some through a situation, an expression, a gesture, a witticism etc. of something liberating before absent. According to this conception the comic emerges then when in a certain context bonded with conventions, rhetoric, custom, habit, fashion, traditional values, etc. comes a gust of freedom that disorders the blocked rules and the order before defined and in a needed anthropic system.
Anthropology and psychology
Also in the first two chapters of anthropological character in Philosophical atheism in the ancient world the topic theme of homeostasis is returning, because it concerns primarily the religious phenomenon, connected with sociability in the archaic human groupings .
The archaic societies are in his opinion very important contexts for the study of the human mind in its original modalities working , because in it are acting four different but connected “organizations” with the psyche as predominant, seen as homologous to the instinct in the animals. To such primary neuronal structure others more recent structures born through evolution: the intellect, the reason and the idema (the nucleus of the individuality and the sensibility).
From such premises about the mind structure the Tamagnone’s thesis is that the homo sapiens found more convenient to maintain low the psychical investment (in freudian terms) to produce the more convenient good vision of the world for its life. That leads him to imagine the supernatural, to make of image and to structure the existence of God or similar as guarantor of the human existence and its future: protecting or inquiring father, benevolent or strict judge, but maker laws and order. The religious phenomenology is shaped for the philosopher according on these psychical bases and uphill the existential attitude. The final target is keep to preserve and to improve the psychical homeostasis.
Psychical Homeostasis
The concept of homeostasis applied to the thoughts, and therefore to the human mind working, has a central importance under the psychological-gnoseological point of view, because it is seen by Tamagnone as strongly influencing the mental attitude regarding the world-view (in German: Weltanschauung). To maintain homeostasis means very often for the psyche keep out of every experience or thought potentially disturbing its quiet state. This concepts is evidently got from Freud "economic principle" regarding to keep low the psychic cathexis (Besetzung).
The real anthropic dualism
The relationship between the man and the physical universe is one of the main places of the speculation of Tamagnone, and assumes meant on the background of the elimination from the gnoseologic horizon of the concept of truth in favour of that of reality one. But the reality concept, as admits the same philosopher, is relativistic, in the sense that between the reality of the cosmos and that human one is an immeasurable abyss. From that a research that goes from the first tamagnonan works to the last ones, becomes rich on its way of always new elements, started from the existentialistic horizon of “Necessity and liberty” to that ontological one of “From the nothing to the becoming of the reality”.
Homeostasis is the mental state that all us, from more to less, want to obtain, because tranquilizes and gratifies us, because gives a sense to the world and the existence of we in it, exorcising the fear of the death, the sense of the unknown, the precariousness and the disorder. The sense of the sacred one, of the supernatural and of the divine, creates thus myths, revelations, squanderers and pacts with God that give mean and purpose to the human existence in a “divine order”, removing the sense of tragic, of chaos, producing rewarding and cheering ontological and existential horizons.
Epistemology
Antiscientism and relativism are characterizing the attitude of the epistemology of Tamagnone, and this seems a littl odd with regard to his taking the science as philosophical basis of ontology. To understand his point of view let's read this passage from a recent essay:
«The real physical is to study at several levels of investigation, from basic structures to its components, from internal mechanisms to evolutive-mofificatiosns, seeking causes and effects, births and deaths, conjugations and disjunction, relations and oppositions. In such general framework, uncertainties and articulated, any absolute is devastating, because the knowledge is evolving, it is a "forward" structuring itself characterized mainly by its errors. The science mistakes, and getting wrong corrects itself, and only by correcting itself can better to approach the reality without ever reach it, because our models of physical reality, deeper or remoter, still nothing more than "mental representations" are. Or if you want "pictures" or "representations", that homo sapiens manufactures about cosmic reality. So, also if if science aims to objectivity, the anthropicity is still very strong, remaining high in many areas of reality.»

C.Tamagnone, From nothing to becoming the reality, § 5.2
Atheistic existentialism
The fact to have placed a pluralistic and so complex ontology allows Tamagnone to call itself outside from the traditional atheism, fundamentally materialistic. He, in fact, declares himself a post-materialist and insists repeatedly on this point. Therefore in base on that his philosophy is very different from Sartre’s one, and over all it implies a strong revaluation of the feelings and the affections, in an existentialistic perspective that the author would want optimistic. But the sense of the tragic one, that is of the irremediable ignorance, suffering and precariousness (see Necessity and liberty § 6,3) seems go in contrary direction, even if it tries to attenuate that accompanying it there it with the sense of comic (ivi § 13,3).
Destiny
For this philosopher the destiny is like a force on the back that pilots the life of the men. Therefore it is not an anthropological a priori, but an a posteriori on the flow of life, as evolutionary way under construction by every living person. The destiny is forming by living and accumulating existential experiences and is something that each individual built up largely as an involuntary way of his life, acting and influencing his decisions and choices. Tamagnone recognizes six destinal elements-agents: the genetic inheritance, the childish imprinting, the condition, the situation, the role, the social class and the level of wealth.
Metaphysical freedom
Tamagnone has made of this concept one of the foundations of the atheist existentialism of which he is promoter. That is a cornerstone not only of the existentialism, but of all his philosophy. It is meaning that the being free from every belief in entity or fact not strictly concerning the real experience (therefore entailing any metaphysical hipostasis) is an indispensable basis of all philosophical researches. For that he said and repeat the metaphysical freedom to be the mother of all other freedoms.
Historical researches
This philosopher has developed, beside the theoretical elaboration, important historic researches with the aim to evidence those gaps in the history of the philosophy that had prevented the solution of serious interpretative difficulties on the thought of the past. The central parts of “Philosophical atheism in the ancient world” are all dedicated to improve the identification and better possible definition of the figure of Leucippus, distinguishing his ontology from that of Democritus (IV chapter). . The book has the two initial chapters (1rst and 2nd) aimed to define anthropologically the problem of the sacred and of pity in theirs establish in the conscience of the homo sapiens. The archaic mentality and the religions in the circum-Mediterranean are examined to the light of the anthropological studies pertaining to several addresses. The Greek politeism and its myths, with its figured and much little sacral naturalism, are seen from Tamagnone like an anthropic cradle where it becomes possible a philosophy of knowing as cultural alternative to a dominant theology.
The IIIrd chapter deals with those thinkers (the Milesian Naturalists, Empedocles, Anaxagoras, the Sophistics) that Tamagnone considers (especially the first ones) as forerunners of ontological pluralism that the Atomists will formulate in evident opposition to the metaphysical monism of Parmenides and other Eleates.
The IVth chapter it (a true essay in the essay) the author develops the topic point of the book: the search of an “authenticity” of the atomistic thought that he judges strongly deceived from a superficial, inattentive or definitely ideological hermeneutics. Leucippus emerges like a figure of great importance, innovative and revolutionary, while Democritus exits scaled down as ontologist but very revalued as ethicist. Tamagnone charges Democritus of serious pejorative changes in original atomistic ontology of Leucippus, with important theoretical confusions, so, after he, became easy by Platon ad following Idealists easy target of the idealistic critic, till the oblivion and perhaps to the physical destruction of all the atomistic written. Only inheritance a Corpus democriteum of conflicting testimonies, where the original indeterminism of Leucippus comes confused and stirred with the determinism of Democritus.
The Vth chapter considers the Cyrenaics, Epicurus and Lucretius, the firsts as forerunners of a sensationalist hedonism that in Epicurus becomes then intellectual. He is picked in its important innovations of ontologic character of the atomism and also in its revolutionary ethics. Lucretius appears as a great poet and forerunner of the modern existentialism in its angst about the living, the suffering and loving.
“Philosophical atheism in the ancient world” finish in a chapter (the 6xt) dedicated it the atheistic elements in the Indian philosophy, where the materialism Carvaka, the dualism Shamkhya and “a native” Buddhism (of Siddharta). In it Tamagnone sees atheistic aspects that motivates in his analysis well and in enough convincing way.
Greater historic engagement is “The Enlightenment and the rebirth of the philosophical atheism”, a cultural travel that leave from XVII the century and that, covering all the XVIII, ends with the beginning of the XIX. The dense and vast book (2 volumes for 1052 pages) is giving a complete rereading of philosophy in those two centuries and the critic research about the prodroms warning signs of the revolutionary illuminist culture in the scenery of the French Ancient Régime under the many aspects that it has represented. A historical and hermeneutical view of the Enlightenment Century that evidences the old and the new in the theirs manifest itself like fight between the sacred and the profane, between the social and the private, between the theological and the blasphemous, between the philosophical and the scientific. In this backcloth miscellaneous and complex we come dipped in the discovery of the ways of thinking, of the attitudes, of the impediments, of the anxieties, of the aspirations of the men of the 1700s, in oscillation between fear and hope, realism and utopia.
If in First Part, except than dedicated to the social, political and economical situation of the Ancièn Régime, to the culture, to the press, to the moral, let alone to the premonitory ones of the Enlightenment, seen in Bacon, Gassendi, Locke and Bayle, in the Second Part Tamagnone deals with the Deists, Hume and Kant. This part is structured around the concept of being, beginning with that concept of “universe-clock” (chapt. 5th) much beloved to the Deists and their appraisers, that one of providential Supreme Being in Voltaire and Rousseau (chapt. 6xt) , that one of the “Uncertainty of the being and the certainty of God” (chapt.7th), than Tamagnone it sees realized in the thought of Hume and Kant, in their doubts and their beliefs.
In the Fourth Part the tamagnonan search is concentrated on the atheism, for that it actually is and for what is not, for the presumed one and the true one, for the appearance and for the essence, for a metaphysics denied that revive under the features of God-Necessity of Pantheism and Deism in substitution of God-Will of the Christianity. From rigorous and exegesis of texts emerges the hidden senses of denying God in order to leave it latent, of to name it in order to deny it, of leaving to extinguish it in the mystification, of eliminating it with instruments philosophically improper. The atheist philosophers of the 1700s, from always more evoked that truly known, are here revealed for that they actually say and not for that people says of them. Their theses, subordinates to the court of the textual analysis, reveal the misunderstandings, the ambiguities, the incoherence that sometimes render them inconsistent. Meslier, La Mettrie, Helvétius, d’Holbach and Diderot appear so dissected and given back in their essentiality.
The Fifth Part, entitled “The end of the Enlightenment” has only two chapters them, the first (17th) catch the depletion of the Enlightenment cultural push already with the Empire of Bonaparte, the tired fight of the Idéologues, heirs of the Philosophes and neglected with depreciation from Napoleon like useless and untimely for his target o power, with the emerged figure of Pierre Cabanis, the doctor - philosopher who places the bases of the modern psychology. Nearby him a strange subject, a strange and psychotic character, in opinion of Tamagnone a grave-digger of last Enlightenment, the Marquis de Sade, object here of a hard biographical-psychological analysis.
Works
* Necessità e libertà (L'ateismo oltre il materialismo) [Necessity and liberty (The atheism beyond the materialism)], Firenze, Clinamen 2004
* Ateismo filosofico nel mondo antico (Religione, naturalismo, materialismo, atomismo. La nascita della filosofia atea), Firenze, Clinamen 2005
* La filosofia e la teologia filosofale (La conoscenza della realtà e la creazione di Dio), Firenze, Clinamen 2007
* L'Illuminismo e la rinascita dell'ateismo filosofico (Teologia, filosofia e scienza nella cultura del Settecento), 2 voll., Firenze, Clinamen 2008
* Dal nulla al divenire della realtà (Il pluralismo ontofisico tra energia, informazione, complessità, caso e necessità.) On-line to: http://nulla-divenire.exactpages.com
Minor writings
* La fisica delle stringhe, in: L'ateo, 2/2001, n° 18, pp.15-16.
* Problemi di crescita, in: L'ateo, 3/2001, n° 19, pp.6-9.
* "Considerazioni filosofiche" di M.A.Bakunin, in: L'ateo, 2/2002, n° 22, pp.14-15.
* Riflessioni per un'etica atea, in: L'ateo, 1/2003, n° 25, pp.16-19.
* UAAR: L'identità di un'unione o l'unione di due identità?, in: L'ateo, 4/2003, n° 28, pp.9-12.
* Il sonno intellettuale dell'ateismo, in: L'ateo, 2/2004, n° 31, pp.19-22.
* Prima del big-bang. Un universo tra tanti e "per caso", in: L'ateo, 2/2005, n° 37, pp.5-7.
* Per un ateismo razionale e consapevole, in: L'ateo, 1/2006, n° 42, pp.19-22.
* Androcrazia. Infamia e imbecillità., in: L'ateo, 4/2006, n° 45, pp.16-18.
* Aspetti evoluzionistici nel naturalismo pre-ottocentesco, in: L'ateo, 1/2009, n° 61, pp.13-16.

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