La filosofia di T. H. Green tra empirismo e idealismo. Osservazioni e interpretazioni di gnoseologia, etica e politica

This work aims to shed new light about the current debate concerning the thought of Thomas H. Green. In the history of philosophy he is considered as one of the most representative exponent of the British Idealism, overshadowed solely by the success of his friend and colleague, Francis H. Bradley. But many scholars have underestimated him for a long time, without really recognising what he had to offer, thinking that Bradley's philosophy was the natural landing and resolution of all his philosophical inconsistencies. Only in the last few decades the scientific community has begun to re-discover and to go deeper into Green's works (especially his Prolegomena to Ethics), bringing to light the hidden meaning of his words. Thanks to the effort of some of them we are now able to analyse him through different eyes, finding out the uniqueness of his thought. But not all the hallmarks and peculiarities have been uncovered untill now and it is here that this work starts. Beginning from the criticism Green turns against the epistemological theory of the empiricism, in particular that of J. Locke and D. Hume, it will be called into question the greenian notion of the eternal consciousness and the different interpretations that have been given. All his philosophy revolves around this idea and it will guide the reader through the whole work, going from the metaphysics of knowledge to the metaphysics of moral and ending in what Plato identified with the true purpose of philosophy: politics. Each aspect of this journey is not only described with the words of Green's current interpreters, but with them of the writer himself, who made the attempt of offering a new reading of Green's thought making to emerge a different nature of his philosophy.