Eugenio Vittorio Rignano (31 May 1870 in Livorno – 9 February 1930 in Milan) was a Jewish Italian philosopher.[1]
He was born in Livorno to Giacomo Rignano and Fortunata Tedesco, into a Jewish family.[2] Rignano edited the journal Rivista di scienza, later known as Scientia (it). His book The Psychology of Reasoning (1923) influenced the social anthropologist Edward Evans-Pritchard.[3] His book Man Not a Machine (1926) was replied to by Joseph Needham's Man A Machine (1927).[4] In 1897 he married Costanza "Nina" Sullam, also from a Jewish family.
Rignano took interest in biology and wrote a book that argued for the inheritance of acquired characteristics.[5] He advanced a moderated Lamarckian hypothesis of inheritance known as "centro-epigenesis".[6][7] His views were controversial and not accepted by most in the scientific community.[8] His book The Nature of Life (1930) was described in a review as presenting a "militant, at times almost an evangelical exposition and defense of an energetic vitalism."[9] However, historian Peter J. Bowler has written that Rignano rejected both materialism and vitalism and adopted a similar position to what was known as emergent evolution.[10] Li Dazhao, one of the founders of the China Communist Party, was an avid reader of Rignano's works.[11]
Rignano's views on acquired characteristics and organic memory are discussed in detail by historian Laura Otis and psychologist Daniel Schacter.[12][13]