In Praise of Illusions: Giacomo Leopardi‘s Ultraphilosophy

Giacomo Leopardi (1798-1837) is better known as a remarkable poet and writer than a philosophical thinker. However, he followed closely the philosophical developments of his time, was profoundly critical of it, and even formulated a rather complex, albeit unsystematic, philosophical response, mainly in his chronological diaries, the Zibaldone di pensieri, but also in many of his novels, dialogues and essays. The aim of this paper is to elucidate the core of Leopardi‘s existential critique of the philosophical views dominating the late eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries, in particular those found in German Idealism and Romanticism, and provide an introduction to the Leopardian ‘ultraphilosophy’, as he chose to call it himself, a kind of philosophy meant to overcome the ills of the ‘progressive’ philosophy of his day.