Matteo Liberatore was an Italian Jesuit philosopher, theologian, and writer.

Life

He studied at the College of the Jesuits at Naples

Naples

Naples is a city in Southern Italy, situated on the country's west coast by the Gulf of Naples. Lying between two notable volcanic regions, Mount Vesuvius and the Phlegraean Fields, it is the capital of the region of Campania and of the province of Naples...

 in 1825, and a year later applied for admission into the Society of Jesus, He entered the novitiate on 9 October 1826. The long course of studies resulted in his teaching philosophy for the space of eleven years, from 1837 until the Revolution of 1848 drove him to Malta

Malta

Malta , officially known as the Republic of Malta , is a Southern European country consisting of an archipelago situated in the centre of the Mediterranean, south of Sicily, east of Tunisia and north of Libya, with Gibraltar to the west and Alexandria to the east.Malta covers just over in...

.

On returning to Italy he was appointed to teach theology, but gave up his professorship to found and assume charge in 1850 of the Civiltà Cattolica, a periodical founded by the Jesuits to defend the cause of the Church and the papacy, and to spread the knowledge of the doctrine of Thomas Aquinas

Thomas Aquinas

Thomas Aquinas, O.P. , also Thomas of Aquin or Aquino, was an Italian Dominican priest of the Catholic Church, and an immensely influential philosopher and theologian in the tradition of scholasticism, known as Doctor Angelicus, Doctor Communis, or Doctor Universalis...

. Liberatore's chief claim to fame was to have brought about the revival of the scholastic philosophy of Aquinas, publishing his own course of philosophy in 1840. This movement he promoted in the class-room, by textbooks on philosophy, by articles in the "Civiltà Cattolica" and other periodicals, by larger and more extensive works, and also by his work as member of the Accademia Romana by appointment of Leo XIII. He attacked Rationalism

Rationalism

In epistemology and in its modern sense, rationalism is "any view appealing to reason as a source of knowledge or justification" . In more technical terms, it is a method or a theory "in which the criterion of the truth is not sensory but intellectual and deductive"...

, Ontologism

Ontologism

Ontologism is a philosophical system most associated with Nicholas Malebranche which maintains that God and divine ideas are the first object of our intelligence and the intuition of God the first act of our intellectual knowledge.-Bibliography:...

, and Rosminianism.

Works

Sommervogel records more than forty of his published works, and gives the titles of more than nine hundred of his articles (including reviews) which appeared in the Civiltà alone. His works include:

• Institutiones Philosophicæ;
• Instructiones Ethicæ;
• a compendiums of logic, metaphysics, ethics, and natural law;
• Della Conoscenza intellettuale: volume 1, volume 2;
• Del Composto umano;
• Dell' Anima umana;
• Degli Universali;
• Chiesa e Stato;
• Dialoghi filosofici;
• Il Matrimomo;
• Roma e il mondo;
• Il Matrimonio e lo Stato;
• Le Commedie filosofiche;
• Spicilegio.