Alberto Radicati,

Count Count (feminine: countess) is a historical title of nobility in certain European countries, varying in relative status, generally of middling rank in the hierarchy of nobility. Pine, L. G. ''Titles: How the King Became His Majesty''. New York: ...

of Passerano (

Torino Turin ( , ; ; , then ) is a city and an important business and cultural centre in northern Italy. It is the capital city of Piedmont and of the Metropolitan City of Turin, and was the first Italian capital from 1861 to 1865. The city is main ...

, 11 November 1698 – 24 October 1737,

The Hague The Hague ( ) is the capital city of the South Holland province of the Netherlands. With a population of over half a million, it is the third-largest city in the Netherlands. Situated on the west coast facing the North Sea, The Hague is the c ...

), was an 18th-century historian, philosopher and

free-thinker Freethought (sometimes spelled free thought) is an unorthodox attitude or belief. A freethinker holds that beliefs should not be formed on the basis of authority, tradition, revelation, or dogma, and should instead be reached by other meth ...

. He was the reputed author of the 1732 work ''A Philosophical Dissertation upon Death, Composed for the Consolation of the Unhappy by a Friend of Truth'', published in

London London is the Capital city, capital and List of urban areas in the United Kingdom, largest city of both England and the United Kingdom, with a population of in . London metropolitan area, Its wider metropolitan area is the largest in Wester ...

. This work created a scandal and led to the arrest of Radicati and his translator.Sylvia Berti, 'Unmasking the Truth: the theme of imposture in early modern European culture, 1660-1730', in James E. Force, David S. Katz (eds.) ''Everything connects: in conference with Richard H. Popkin: essays in his honor'', 1999, p.34; Giovanni Tarantino, “Alternative Hierarchies: Manhood and Unbelief in Early Modern Europe, 1660-1750”, in Governing Masculinities: Regulating Selves and Others in the Early Modern Period, ed. by

Susan Broomhall Susan Broomhall is an Australian historian and academic. She is an Australian Research Council Future Fellow and Professor of History at The University of Western Australia, and from 2018 Co-Director of the ARC Centre of Excellence for the His ...

and Jacqueline Van Gent, Ashgate, 2011, pp. 209-225. The ''Dissertation upon Death'' is referenced by

George Berkeley George Berkeley ( ; 12 March 168514 January 1753), known as Bishop Berkeley (Bishop of Cloyne of the Anglican Church of Ireland), was an Anglo-Irish philosopher, writer, and clergyman who is regarded as the founder of "immaterialism", a philos ...

in his 1733 '' Theory of Vision Vindicated'', section 5. There Radicati's work is used as an example of a free-thinker explicitly adopting the radical views attributed to the free-thinkers by Berkeley in his 1732 dialogue ''

Alciphron Alciphron () was an ancient Greek sophist, and the most eminent among the Greek epistolographers. Regarding his life or the age in which he lived we possess no direct information whatsoever. Works We possess under the name of Alciphron 116 fict ...

'', and so to defend Berkeley against the charge of attacking a

strawman A straw man fallacy (sometimes written as strawman) is the informal fallacy of refuting an argument different from the one actually under discussion, while not recognizing or acknowledging the distinction. One who engages in this fallacy is said ...

References

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* {{DEFAULTSORT:Radicati, Alberto 18th-century Italian philosophers 18th-century Italian historians 1698 births 1737 deaths People from the Savoyard state