SOURCE: Pesaresi, Massimo Mandolini. “Leopardi's Platonic Temper.” In Giacomo Leopardi: Estetica e Poesia, edited by Emilio Speciale, pp. 57-75. Ravenna, Italy: Longo Editore, 1992.

In the following essay, Pesaresi discusses the critical debate on whether or not Leopardi was a Platonic thinker, noting that the relationship between ethics and aesthetics in the poet's work was complicated and ambiguous.

The dispute on Leopardi's Platonism, being partly a terminological one, risks to be marred with nominalistic elusiveness. Before deciding to which extent Leopardi was a “Platonic” thinker, one should have a fairly precise and consistent definition of Platonism: which, of course, is not always the case, and, in a sense, cannot be the case, because such an apodeictic clarity is rarely the lot of historical discussions.

Out of the extreme complexity and ambiguity of the notion of Platonism, therefore, I will simply point to a few aspects that have been notably...