Description:
8vo, pp. 116; woodcut vignette on title; some light staining to last couple of leaves, but otherwise clean; crudely bound in recent maroon wrappers.Very uncommon first Venetian printing of a surprisingly uncommon book, first published in Modena the previous year. One of the last works of the philosopher, translator, and sometime tutor of Manzoni, Francesco Soave (1743-1806).
In Italian philosophical circles, Soave had made his name with his translations of Locke in the 1770s, and his empiricist instincts are very much present in his treatment of Kant's philosophy. The dedication, to Francesco Melzi d'Eril, sets out Soave's stall, calling Kant's philosophy one 'that tends to destroy all the ideas and the maxims that had been most firmly established, both in the practical and in the speculative sciences'. Soave, noting that Kant had been largely ignored in France and Italy until the publication of Villers' Philosophie de Kant ou Principes fondamentaux de la philosophie transcendale in 1801, relies… Read More