The Integral Philosophical Exprerience of Actualism (original) (raw)

Actualism and its Author: Prospects for the future of Gentile studies

Il Pensiero Italiano. Rivista di studi filosofici, 2017

This article describes the recent reception of Giovanni Gentile and his doctrine of actualism, describing the philosopher's rehabilitation as a major Italian thinker and actualism as a provocative account of socially situated consciousness. The discussion then turns to the future of Gentile studies, focusing on ways in which the ahistorical methods of analytic philosophy might help restore actualism and its author to their proper place in the philosophical canon.

Actualism and its author: Prospects for the future of Gentile studies [DRAFT]

Giovanni Gentile remains, in Sergio Romano's words, 'an awkward philosopher'. Some twenty years after Gabriele Turi called for 'a return to a strictly philosophical Gentile', this paper sets out some of the major interpretations of actualism and its author to have emerged since interest in them was revived in the 1990s. It is argued that what remains to be seen is a robust analytic treatment of actualism, which leaves the historical Gentile to a large extent out of the picture. Such a treatment would constitute a valuable addition to the existing literature on Gentile and to Anglo-American philosophy more broadly.

'GIOVANNI GENTILE' - An Introductory Essay to 'THE THEORY OF MIND AS PURE ACT'

THE THEORY OF MIND AS PURE ACT (translated from 'La Teoria dello Spirito come Atto Puro') - by Giovanni Gentile, 2002

This 'Introductory Essay' serves as an entry-point to the philosophy of Giovanni Gentile. A biographical sketch is provided of his life, taking us from his youth up through his university studies, his friendship with Benedetto Croce and his involvement with Benito Mussolini's fascism. Gentile's 'idealist' philosophy is described in its general theory so as to make the perusal of this difficult volume easier for the reader. His philosophy represents one of the most hard-line and extreme versions of idealism ever committed to print. In fact, it is the species of idealism known as 'Solipsism', for in his philosophy nothing outside of the perceiving self actually exists. It is essential to go back to J.G. Fichte and George Berkeley to discover anything that equals his idealism in its thoroughgoing nature. The relationship of his philosophy to that of Kant, the forefather of modern idealism, is discussed briefly in the section on Gentile's philosophy. His roles as an educator and politician are not, however, ignored, and separate sections are devoted to each of these topics. This essay is not for the advanced Gentile scholar but it does serve as a useful introduction to his work for those who are not aware of this important Italian Idealist. A bibliography of his works, including references to some works about Giovanni Gentile, follow the essay itself.

The Idea of God in the Actualist Tradition

Il Pensiero Storico. Rivista internazionale di storia delle idee, 2020

This paper traces the development of the idea of God that appears in the 'actualist tradition', represented by the works of Giovanni Gentile, as well as his predecessor Bertrando Spaventa and his students Guido De Ruggiero and Ugo Spirito. It is shown that the actualists' idea of God is rooted in an intellectual genealogy extending back to the Scholastics and developed through successive attempts to make sense of a Christian God in a scheme of pure immanence, culminating in a humanistic view of God as an ideal to which subjects can aspire in their own thinking.

Phenomenology of the Inapparent: a methodological approach to the New Realism

Phänomenologie und spekulativer Realismus. Phenomenology and Speculative Realism. Phénoménologie et réalisme spéculatif. Ferrer, Guillermo; Gourdain, Syvaine; Garrera Tolbert, Nicolás; Schnell, Alexander (Eds.), 2022

Speculative realism has grown strong in philosophy, challenging what its supporters call philosophies of correlation. Aiming at a renewal of previous ideas, this train of thought relies on mechanisms to indicate its originality and report the previous tradition as a wrong path towards the proper opinion. In this procedure, the election of opponents is deliberated and is anchored in both the history of philosophy and contemporary trends, such as phenomenology. A colourful gigantomachia occurs, one that in many ways goes back to the struggle between materialists and the friends of Ideas that Plato recounted in Sophist. 1 This iteration, as has also happened many times, hides the concepts that are actually at stake, since phenomenology is seen in a partial and restricted way that completely distorts its scope. A quick survey of the works of authors who in recent times have addressed this issue reveals a tendency to rely on the static and genetic stages of phenomenology as if they were a synthesis of Husserl's thought. Thus, any development that lacks these traits is considered alien, including some ideas of Husserl himself. The development of French phenomenology illustrates this point well, pointing out some issues that exceed common phenomena and overtake the limits of intentional correlation. The so-called theological turn shows this tension, as does speculative realism, which incorporates some similar elements. Meillassoux's challenge to "think a world without thought, a world without the givenness of the world" to "understand how thought is able to access the uncorrelated, which is to say, a world capable of subsisting without being given", 2 or Harman's proposal about the irreducibility and inexhaustibility of objects are examples of this point. Indeed, the new realisms often object to many philosophies because they are not be able to account for a non-metaphysical absolute. In the case of phenomenology, this is a very impoverished view of its scope and a revision of this idea could lessen the collision. Texts like Tom Sparrow's The End of Phenomenology, which cuts ties between realism and phenomenology, do not help to solve the issue. 3 In this work, we shall take as our source the phenomenological horizon in order to show its deep compatibility with many developments associated with new realisms. Firstly, we shall review some aspects of what we call the 'phe …

Actualism as a Form of Liberal Naturalism--preprint

The Routledge Handbook of Liberal Naturalism, Mario de Caro and David Macarthur (eds), Routledge, 2022

It is argued that the features of a “liberal naturalism” as sought by advocates of that approach to philosophy might be found in the writings of “actualists” within recent debates in analytic modal metaphysics—here, Robert Stalnaker. The advantage of actualism over naturalism, it is argued, is that the idea of the actual world comes with the mind built into it from the start, and so one is not faced with the problem of finding a place for mind in nature. This should not be regarded as evidence of some unwanted “supernaturalism” on the part of actualists, however, but rather is a consequence of the actualist’s critique of the presupposed supernaturalistic semantic assumptions within rival views.