Simone Corleo: Psychophysiology Enters the Realm of Philosophy

At the beginning of the twentieth century Simone Corleo was described by G. Gentile as a philosopher who “remained closed within his insular culture” and, in contrast, by F. Orestano and A. Aliotta as a great statesman and man of science.This paper aims to provide a picture of the Sicilian philosopher (1823-1891), who taught moral philosophy at the University of Palermo.Philosophy was for him a science concerned with the study of the constant laws of thinking so as to reach that principle of identity which regulates the stream of knowledge. He wondered how objects are perceived by the senses, which inevitably provide subjective perception, and concluded that it was thanks to the human ability to associate perceptions according to the principles of similarity, time and space, cause and effect. This led him to investigate perception as organic electricity. Disproving Franklin’s theory of imponderable fluids, he affirmed that heat, light and electro-magnetism flowed through bodies. Therefore, philosophy was necessarily connected to physiology and psychology.