In the first years after the war, Abbagnano's interest turned to American pragmatism. Above all is the version offered by John Dewey to the philosophy of science and to neopositivism. In existentialism, having freed himself from the negative implications he found in Heidegger, in Jaspers, in Sartre, in Dewey's pragmatism and in neopositivism, Abagnano saw the signs of a new philosophical trend, that he called a "New Enlightenment" in an article written in 1948. The development of this idea in the fifties was precisely characterized both by his interest in science, in particular, sociology, and by an attempt to define the program of a philosophy, that he first called a "New Enlightenment" and later a "methodological empirism". During this period essays were collected in Possibilità e libertà (1956) and in Problemi di sociologia (1959) but, one of his most important works is the Dizionario di filosofia (1961), a true "summa" meant to clarify the principal concepts of philosophy.
In the first years after the war, Abbagnan,o,'s interest turned to American pragmatism. Above all is the version offered by John Dewey to the philosophy of science and to neopositivism. In existentialism, having freed himself from the negative implications he found in Heidegger, in Jaspers, in Sartre, in Dewey's pragmatism and in neopositivism Abagnano saw the signs of a new philosophical trend, that he called a "New Enlightenment" in an article written in 1948. The development of this idea in the fifties was precisely characterized both by his interest in science in particular, sociology, and by an attempt to define the program of a philosophy, that he first called a "New Enlightenment" and later a "methodological empirism". During this period essays were collected in Possibilità e libertà (1956) and in Problemi di sociologia (1959) but, one of his most important works is the Dizionario di filosofia (1961), a true "summa" meant to clarify the principal concepts of philosophy.