Il problema dell'ateismo [The Problem of Atheism]

Bologna: Il Mulino, 1964. First edition (in Italian). Octavo. Original paper wrappers and dust jacket (not price-clipped). Minor edgewear and toning to wrappers and dust jacket, else fine.. First edition of Augusto Del Noce's (1910-1989) first book, Il problema dell'ateismo, published by Il Mulino in 1964. Del Noce was among Italy's preeminent post-war political and philosophical thinkers whose works and thought have begun to reach the wider Western world thanks to the recent English translations by Carlo Lancelloti of the City University of New York (College of Staten Island) and the McGill-Queen's University Press. In this, his magnum opus, Del Noce assembled his finest works on atheism, Marxism, and Western secularization, evaluating the secularizing trends of modernity and tracing their philosophical roots into our precarious present. Del Noce sought to advance a genealogical history of modern philosophy to explain the modern West's turn toward atheism and its shift away from classical metaphysics and religion. "Modernity" for Del Noce, together with its attendant rationalism, atheism, and materialism, represents but one possible outcome-a problematic outcome-of a modern philosophical struggle over the future and fate of Western metaphysics and culture. As a result, modernity does not represent the necessary consequence of history; it is rather the culmination of a line of rationalist movements (idealism, positivism, Marxism) that presuppose the very atheism that many now (naively) view as the logical endpoint of Western culture. Such movement, he warns, ends not in fulfillment but rather in nihilism. Del Noce's ability to genealogically reconstruct the philosophical present from the past is without rival, and his talent for forecasting future trends has proven eerily prescient in the decades following his death. The foundations of Del Noce's decades-long project to diagnose and treat the maladies of modernity can be found in Il problema dell'ateismo. A bright first edition (in the original Italian) of this landmark work by one of Italy's greatest modern philosophers.