Abstract

In his many books devoted to Aristotle , Armando Carlini sketches out an original theoretical analysis, echoing the main tenets of his own philosophical development. According to Carlini, Aristotle’s “religious problem” goes beyond philosophy of religion and connects ontology and gnoseology within a framework of philosophical ‘actualism’. At different degrees, the essence of God and man is thought and self-consciousness. God is the full actuality of self-thinking, the perfect form of self-consciousness. Man, as he experiences that contemplative life described in Nicomachean Ethics bk 10, is self-consciousness in search of the self; and he does it by going up to the other from himself . In his still relevant analysis of bks. 7-8-9 and 12 of the Metaphysics, Carlini points out that Aristotle’s inquiry on the “on he on” is fully revealed as “act within the act of knowledge”. There is a complete coincidence of the actuality of substance and act through which we attain its knowledge: Aristotle’s ousia is the perfect synthesis of ‘act of thinking’ and ‘the thought object’