La diligente salute: Contini sul significato dell’attività intellettuale

Starting from his work L‟influenza culturale di Benedetto Croce,the paper proposes a reconstruction of Gianfranco Contini’s conception of intellectual activity. In par-ticular, it argues that the philologist conceived of this activity as a ‘health method’, which is to say as a rational activity that lends order to reality and assuages human anxieties. At the same time, the paper highlights the indebtedness of Contini’s con-ception to thinkers such as Spitzer,Hölderlin, Rosmini and, indeed, Croce himself