Abstract

Luigi Scaravelli is well-known to the scholarly community especially for his elegant analysis of Kant's texts, but he had a deep knowledge of the Hegelian thought as well. Scaravelli's work on Hegel's philosophy was a long-lasting reflection, largely intertwined with the development of his own theoretical masterpiece ("Critica del capire", 1942). In this text, the search for a conception of reality that would break the homogeneity of the substance and the mechanism of nature, in order to draw the dimension of spontaneity and freedom (of the "spirit"), found in Hegel a privileged interlocutor, a model and a critical target at the same time. This essay follows Scaravelli's deconstruction of the dialectic process, analyzing the theoretical points of this interpretation on the background of the broader articulation provided in the "Critica del capire". Finally, it identifies the meaning of this clash in Scaravelli's effort to reflect on the relation between "substance" and "subject", "necessity" and "freedom" going beyond the Hegelian aporias.