Antonio Banfi

Abstract

Antonio Banfi (1886–1957). Banfi’s aesthetics begins with an unprejudiced opening toward aesthetic and artistic experience in all its vitality and complexity, and with the assertion that this experience is compromised by current ways of theorizing (especially by theories influenced by the neo-idealistic philosophical tradition where Italy is concerned). The remedy to this situation is not connected, in Banfi’s reflections with some intuitive form of abandoning oneself to lived immediacy, but rather with an investigation exploring worlds of knowledge presented by history.