Where does modern philosophy begin?
Ask when modern philosophy begins and the answer comes back fast: with Descartes, alone with his doubts, deciding that nothing counts as knowledge until it has been secured from the ground up. Jéssica Sánchez Espillaque’s essay in Studia Hegeliana recovers a long argument that this answer is less a finding than a choice — and that the choice was made, in good part, by Hegel and the German idealism that followed him. The philosopher who pressed the point was Ernesto Grassi (1902–1991), an Italian who spent ten years as Martin Heidegger’s assistant in Freiburg and the rest of a long career insisting that modernity has a second birthplace: the rhetorical humanism of the Italian Renaissance.
What hangs on this is not a date. It is what philosophy is taken to be. If modern thought begins with Descartes, its founding question is the ground of knowledge — el problema del saber — and everything before it counts as preparation. If it begins with the humanists, the founding question is the word: the historical, image-bearing, situated word that opens a world before any proof can be built inside it.
Ernesto Grassi: from Milan to Heidegger’s Freiburg
The essay’s method is genealogical. It reads Grassi’s earliest writings, from a 1922 piece in the Catholic review Rassegna Nazionale to the pivotal 1940 lecture “Der Beginn des modernen Denkens,” and watches the position assemble itself.
Grassi took his degree in Milan in 1925 under the neo-Kantian Piero Martinetti (1872–1943), in an Italy where philosophy meant Benedetto Croce and Giovanni Gentile, heirs of Bertrando Spaventa’s nineteenth-century project of naturalising Hegel on Italian soil. A meeting with Edmund Husserl at Freiburg in 1924 gave Grassi a phrase he repeated for the rest of his life. Husserl told the young Italian that his nationality predestined him for philosophy, because Italians, having a feel for the concrete, go straight to the phenomenon instead of setting out from abstract and aprioristic schemes. When Grassi answered that Italian philosophy was busy reconnecting itself to systematic Hegelianism, Husserl’s reply was blunt: in that case you are lost, and there is no remedy.
By 1928 Grassi was in Germany, meeting Jaspers, Scheler and Nicolai Hartmann before becoming Heidegger’s assistant until 1938. The essay presents him as an unorthodox student rather than a disciple; his reading of humanism runs against Heidegger’s own.
Two Renaissance humanisms, one of them mislaid
The pivot of Grassi’s case is a division inside Renaissance humanism itself. One strand — the one that fills the textbooks — begins with Marsilio Ficino (1433–1499) and the recovery of Plato; it is metaphysical and speculative, concerned with the order of being. The other, chronologically earlier and philological in temper, is what Grassi calls rhetorical humanism, and it begins not with an ontology but with the problem of the word: a word that is historical rather than abstract, and that clarifies reality rather than merely reporting it.
It is this second strand that Grassi holds to have been obscured, and the obscuring has a mechanism. Once philosophy takes the ground of knowledge as its fundamental problem, it is carried toward the idealist concept of system, in which philosophy becomes the last foundation of every science. Thought as foundation cannot be made into an object; it has to demonstrate itself; and the self in which knowledge takes root turns out not to be the empirical self but an ahistorical subject, cut loose from the here and the now where human problems actually arise. Being, posed this way, is posed as the knowledge of being — the manner of showing pre-identified with a single one of its forms.
Hegel, Spaventa, and the vanishing of Renaissance philosophy
Hegel’s Lectures on the History of Philosophy then supplies the periodisation: Descartes as the creator of modern philosophy, the Renaissance as an interval, its philosophy demoted to a premonition and its interest reassigned to painting and poetry. Spaventa completed the transfer for Italy with a famous line — that the true heirs of Bruno, Vanini, Campanella and Vico were not later Italians but Spinoza, Kant, Fichte, Schelling and Hegel. Italian philosophy, on this reading, had emigrated; what remained at home was ornament.
Vico’s verum ipsum factum against the Cartesian criterion
Here Giambattista Vico (1668–1744) enters, and the essay’s most generative claim arrives with him. In De nostri temporis studiorum ratione (1708) and De antiquissima Italorum sapientia (1710), Vico attacked the modern curriculum precisely for starting from the primacy of truth and knowledge, and answered the Cartesian criterion with his own: verum ipsum factum, the rule of the true is to have made it. The mind knows itself but does not make itself, and so cannot know the manner in which it knows.
Sánchez Espillaque’s proposal is that Vico’s critique of Cartesian rationalism can be carried forward onto German idealism, since idealism performs the same reduction — of how reality shows itself to how reality is known — on a larger scale. She draws out, too, the consequence Grassi took most seriously: that Vichian science aims at the verisimile, a truth valid inside presupposed limits, and that words carry no meaning detachable from the contexts that produced them.
The studies this makes possible
The extension from Vico to Hegel is set out here as a warranted possibility, which is what an essay of this scale can establish; the project that follows is to execute it at close range. That study would set Vico’s ingenium and his art of topics against Hegel’s own handling of language, representation and memory in the Encyclopaedia, and it would first have to settle a question of transmission: what Hegel knew of Vico, and by which channel — Herder, the Neapolitan circle around Vincenzo Cuoco, or Jules Michelet’s French version of the 1820s. A negative finding would be as useful as a positive one, since Grassi’s thesis concerns a forgetting, and forgettings have documentable routes.
Second, the genealogy reconstructed here is doctrinal, and it can now be paired with an institutional one. Spaventa’s line was not only an interpretation but a curriculum, arriving at the moment of Italian unification. A study of philosophy chairs, syllabi and textbook canons in Italian universities between 1860 and 1940 — read alongside the young Grassi’s correspondence with Gentile, Croce, Castelli and Calogero — would show whether Renaissance rhetoric was argued out of the discipline or simply timetabled out of it.
Third, the argument would travel further if tested against Grassi’s own German canon. The quarrel here is with idealism, yet Grassi set his return to antiquity apart from Werner Jaeger’s German neohumanism, and his later books turn to Meister Eckhart, Novalis and Nietzsche for the metaphorical word. Nietzsche already appears in these early writings as the German who recovered the ancient world without the doctrine of progress, replacing it with eternal return. Following the metaphorical word across those figures would determine whether the dispute is with idealism in particular or with a wider habit that idealism happened to formalise.
Fourth, there is a route the essay itself travels. Grassi first reached Spanish readers through Chile in 1954 and Valparaíso in 1956, later through Anthropos in Barcelona and Cuadernos sobre Vico in Seville. A reception history of that Hispanophone passage would demonstrate the thesis in its own right: a word arriving somewhere by translation, and doing different work when it lands.
Rhetoric, education, and the word that opens
Grassi’s wager is finally an educational one. The studia humanitatis mattered to him because understanding a word is itself the unfolding of what a human being is; classical texts open worlds that rationalist logic cannot catch, and a formation that takes in the passions is not a softer discipline but a wider one. Vico had already seen where the alternative led — the primacy of knowledge ending in the decay of the sciences.
Which leaves the reader with the questions worth carrying forward. If the beginning of modernity is a decision rather than a discovery, who else made it, and where is it still being made? And what would a curriculum look like that started from the word?
Sánchez Espillaque, Jéssica. “De la primacía del saber a la preeminencia de la palabra: La disputa de E. Grassi con el idealismo alemán.” Studia Hegeliana 12 (2026): 121–37. https://doi.org/10.24310/stheg.12.2026.23395.
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