Principi di una antropologia della persona nell'opera di Ernesto De Martino

It is well known that among cultural anthropologists and philosophers there is always a historical gap and a difference of interests, language and method, which often causes a rivalry between the two disciplines that ends to stiffen anthropology in a collection of descriptions without universal principles and philosophy in a reflection of noble ambitions but unable to consider the individual human cases. The main aim of this thesis is to read the complete works of the philosopher and anthropologist Ernesto de Martino (Naples 1908 - Rome 1965) as a point of union, isolated and sui generis, between anthropology and philosophy. The goal is to obtain, from the reading of his works, a true anthropology of the person who somehow bring order to his unsystematic work, searching in it a common thread: the person, based on the overcoming of life in value , synthesis of necessity and freedom, of transcendental truths and cultural variety. Therefore our aim is not to reconstruct philologically the work and the figure of de Martino or investigate from a historical point of view on the originality of the sources present in it. De Martino is not here treated as an end but as an instrument of knowledge of the human person in its essential aspects, moral and ethical. Thus, the aim of this work is theoretical and moral, that is: with the attempt to restore unity to the work of de Martino, we consider the ultimate and overarching meaning of his anthropology, rather than those moments of dialogue between ethnology, politics and philosophy in his work certainly present; then we wonder not so much who was de Martino as a scholar (problem still treated in this work) but what kind of scientific-philosophical proposal is his and if this proposal, given its ethical and epistemological complexity, can become the foundation for an organic human study that so far neither ethnology nor philosophy can, independently of each other, to ensure.