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Reading Il Caffè: scientific method and economic knowledge in the “School of Milan” 287

2.“Nose-ological Elements Demonstrated by Mathematical Method”:
Readings from Il Caffè

«This work was launched by a small group of friends for the
pleasure of writing, for love of praise and with the ambition (which
they are not ashamed to confess) of awakening a more vital taste for
reading in Italian spirits, as well as an esteem for the sciences and the
arts, and - most important – a love of virtue, honesty; the fulfillment of
one’s duties»: so recites the appeal “To the reader” in the first issue of
Il Caffè, setting a program faithfully adhered to and developed in the
30
two years that followed .
The “esteem for the sciences” was without doubt among the
principal traits of the articles which appeared in the periodical between
1764 and 1766, even though one of the questions most tenaciously
examined by these enlightened Lombards was precisely the clarification
of the term ‘science’ and the definition of the limits of applicability of
the scientific method to a knowledge of the economy and the society: a
task which the adepts of the Accademia dei Pugni considered must
necessarily regard the reforming intellectual closely, forming part of
his “fulfillment of [his] duties”, as well as satisfying his love for «virtue»
and «honesty». The ample and suggestive description in Verri’s Temple
of Ignorance 31 (‘Tempio dell’Ignoranza’), which appeared in one of the
first sheets printed by the Enlightened Milanese in 1761, furnishes us
with a powerful analysis of cultural structure and knowledge which
was the heritage of earlier centuries, and at the same time, formulates
a lucid procedural program:

The vast temple is Gothic in structure, and at the topmost point of its great
portal, roughly hewn, an enormous yawning mouth may be discerned; on the
two sides of this door stand two statues, one to the right and the other to the
left, each naughtily turning its back in the very act of going off in the opposite
direction from the other – and on the pedestal of the one we see etched
Theory, on the other read Practice .
32
Thus the schematic, sclerotic, opposition between theory and
practice is the premonitory sign of ignorance, which finds its resolution
in the long description of the temple’s interior nave and, above all, of
the crypt hollowed out beneath it, filled with

30 FR1, 5; the italics are mine.
31 FR1, 27-9.
32 FR1, 28-9.

n.43 Mediterranea - ricerche storiche - Anno XV - Agosto 2018
ISSN 1824-3010 (stampa) ISSN 1828-230X (online)