Alessandro Serpieri Piarist: a sui generis scientist

Abstract

This contribution aims to highlight the profoundly human aspects of Alessandro Serpieri’s personality, as emerge from the testimonies related to the teaching he practiced for his students and from his scientific writings; and to underline above all the particularities of his scientific vision in which an integral catholic faith permeates a very clear rationalist approach, thus preventing him from slipping towards past Enlightenment extremisms or towards the looming positivist materialism. From this point of view, Serpieri might be defined as an ancient rationalist, far away from the typical rationalism introduced by the Scholasticism in late Middle Ages and accepted ever since then from the Catholic Church. What emerges is the portrait of a multifaceted scientist, gifted with uncommon qualities. We will also recall some ideas, original for that time, which in the following decades and in particular in the second half of the twentieth century would find fruitful developments especially in the field of theoretical physics.