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Guido de Ruggiero (1888-1948) was perhaps the greatest Italian
intellectual historian in the twentieth century. He was a fierce
champion of liberalism, an ardent opponent of Fascism, an
insightful critic and interpreter of his contemporaries, and a
formidable philosopher in his own right. Idealism & Experience:
The Philosophy of Guido de Ruggiero comprises eight new critical
essays, as well as English translations of five of de Ruggiero's
most important shorter writings, which chart the development of his
thought between 1914 and 1946. Taken together, these essays reveal
the range, richness and philosophical sophistication of de
Ruggiero's ideas, enabling Anglophone readers to appreciate their
enduring relevance in our own troubled times.
The Italian author Giovanni Gentile (1875-1944) occupied a radical
position among philosophers of the first half of the twentieth
century. He tried in earnest to revolutionize idealist theory,
developing a doctrine that retained the idealist conception of the
thinking subject as the centre and source of any intelligible
reality, while eschewing many of the unwarranted abstractions that
had pervaded earlier varieties of idealism and led their adherents
astray. Given his great prominence during his lifetime, it is
perhaps remarkable that Gentile is so little discussed, and even
then so poorly understood, in the English-speaking world. Few of
his works have ever been translated into English, and these
represent only a fraction of his great corpus and the many topics
discussed therein. This neglect is partly explained by his close
association with the Partito Nazionale Fascista (National Fascist
Party), of which he remained a loyal member and supporter between
1923 and his assassination in 1944. The volume comprises eleven
essays. Seven of these are new pieces written especially for
Thought Thinking, and are intended both to contribute to ongoing
debates about Gentile's philosophy and to indicate just a few of
its many aspects that continue to draw the attention of
philosophers, political theorists and intellectual historians.
These are supplemented by new English translations of four of
Gentile's shorter works, selected to offer some direct insight into
his ideas and style of writing.
Recent moral philosophers have had little to say about Giovanni
Gentile's 'actual idealism', which is widely dismissed as a kind of
obscurantist Hegelianism used to conceal flimsy justifications for
the state's total impunity over questions of morality and truth.
While Gentile is increasingly recognised as a major figure in
twentieth-century Italian culture, actual idealism itself has yet
to be given a full and impartial philosophical appraisal. Giovanni
Gentile and the State of Contemporary Constructivism represents the
first book-length treatment of actual idealist moral theory. Part I
describes and criticises Gentile's stated view, showing that it
includes several ambiguities that he exploits in order to align it
with Fascist totalitarianism. Part II develops a modified version
that is more consistent with the basic tenets of actual idealism.
It is argued that Gentile's theory is best understood as a radical
constructivist doctrine according to which all thinking has a moral
character. Rigorously conceived, it promotes not uncritical
submission to the state, but free and self-regulating thought in
the absence of a fully objective reality. Thus Gentile demonstrates
both the plausibility and the limitations of any uncompromising
form of anti-realist constructivism.
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