Luigi Ferri, the Italian epistemologist and historian of philosophy, was born in Bologna. He studied at Paris and was professor of the history of philosophy at Florence and at Rome. A self-styled disciple of Terenzio Mamiani, Ferri contributed to Mamiani's journal, La filosofia delle scuole italiana, and continued editing the journal, under the title Rivista italiana di filosofia, from the death of Mamiani in 1885 until his own death in Rome in 1895.

Ferri's philosophizing moved within the framework of Italian ontologism, which saw in man the capacity for a direct and "intuitive" relationship with the Absolute (Being or God), but his interest focused principally on the psychological conditions in which this relationship takes shape. His investigations, therefore, had as their object man's interior experience, the "inner (or intimate) sense" of which Maine de Biran spoke. To the latter Ferri owed his basic inspirations. Reproving associationist...