Su follia e imputabilità. Un contributo alla psicologia e al diritto

[Autom. eng. transl.] The imputability of the "crazy" criminals is, in Europe, in the first decades of the nineteenth century, a problem still open. Although the Code pénal napoleonico of 1810 was the subject of the judiciary, a real epistemological demarcation of the field of investigation remains to be traced. The 1824 treaty of the young Danish forensic doctor Frantz Gotthard Howitz (1789-1826) On madness and imputability he tries to answer these questions from a medical, legal and, above all, philosophical point of view. In opposition to the Kantian doctrine of freedom, Howitz is convinced, on the basis of English empiricists, that the rational disposition of man who has, on his opposite, degeneration in madness, consists of a capacitas motivorum, which has no particular connection with the moral sphere, depending rather on the physiological constitution of the individual. Howitz's treatise will give rise to the most heated and prolonged diatribe in the history of philosophy in Denmark, the so-called Howitzfejde, whose echoes, thanks to the voice of Kierkegaard, seem to have also passed into the epistemological debate of the major exponents of the phenomenological-existential current.