IL «FATTORE-HUME» NELLA METAFISICA DI BONTADINI FILOSOFIA DELL’ESPERIENZA E PROBLEMA DELLA CAUSALITÀ

The presence of David Hume in Gustavo Bontadini’s thought is anything but accidental. Bontadini has devoted several historiographical analyses to the Scottish thinker, enhancing the tendentially «pure» instance of his philosophy of experience, but also critically highlighting the places where it remains attached to the dualistic motifs of earlier empiricism. In this work of confrontation and discussion, Bontadini came to accept some of Hume’s doctrinal solutions, and in particular his critique of the relation of cause and effect. This led him to rethink traditional demonstrations of the existence of God in the light of an impossibility of the via causationis. The result is therefore a departure from the methods of Scholastic Aristotelianism and, in general, a weakening of the aetiological character of metaphysics. Moreover, the causality recovered by Bontadini through theological means is such that the distinction between the cause itself and its effect is reduced to a minimum.