British idealism is usually regarded as having been, in the main, indifferent to the problems of the philosophy of history. The interest in the philosophy of history found in German, and later in Italian, idealism was allegedly not shared by the early generations of the British idealists. At best they are regarded as unwitting precursors of things to come, some of their reflections paving the way for subsequent advances in historical thinking. The British idealists, however, were not (...) as economical with their historical pronouncements as commonly believed. A more careful examination of their general writings and lesser known contributions reveals a more complex picture. One of stronger historical consciousness, knowledge of the philosophical developments in history, interest in its problems, and active involvement with historical scholarship. Further study will certainly illuminate the details of the entire character of British idealism with regard to its historical concerns. (shrink)

This title offers a cultural translation of modern Italian intellectual and philosophical history, a development book-ended by Giambattista Vico and Antonio Gramsci. It shows Italian philosophy to have emerged during the age of the Risorgimento in reaction to 18th century French revolutionary and rationalist standards in politics and philosophy and in critical assimilation of the German reaction to the same, mainly Hegelian idealism and, eventually, Heideggerian existentialism. This is the story of modern Italian philosophy told through (...) the lens of Renaissance scholarship. (shrink)

The paper challenges the fashionable interpretation of Machiavelli as an idealistic champion of liberty and self-governance, and tries to demonstrate -- through textual analysis -- that the ideology of Italian fascism is permeated by Machiavellian themes and principles. Although this convergence is generally ignored in the scholarly literature on fascism and was rarely acknowledged by Mussolini or Gentile themselves, it is evident in their hostility to metaphysical abstractions, their contempt for the idea of moral progress, their indifference to conventional (...) moral pieties, their reduction of politics to underlying power struggles, their view of the patria as the foundation of existence, and their desire to rescue Italy from its present enfeeblement by recreating the glories of the Roman past. Machiavelli, often depicted as an essentially left-wing figure, can be seen as a precursor of fascism. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:112 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY Gallie's Peirce and Pragmatism (1952). She believes that the translation of Peirce's theory of the categories into the conceptual framework of British empiricism and naturalism misrepresents Peirce's cosmology which had very peculiar traits--traits which the author associates with the Platonic tradition. She shows in detail how Peirce tried at first (1868) to relate his three categories to the Scotist, Scholastic, concepts of "essence" and (...) "substance," and how, in his various phaneroscopic experiments, he gradually repudiated the Scholastic languages and by 1902 was ready to interpret his three categories as an adequate ontology. What led Peirce in this direction was his critique of perceptual judgment. He realized that subject and object are in dynamical, social, and historical relation to each other. A logical object is, therefore, also a "dynamic object" or objective. This insight led him at first to regard his doctrine of signs and their interpretation as a humanist or idealist doctrine, for the idealists had also recognized objects as objectives. Nynfa Bosco is quick to appreciate that this interpretation of acts of knowing is closely related to Gentile's idealism. But gradually a more ontological and Platonic interpretation emerges in Peirce, until in the end "thirdness" is a modernist version of the reality of universals. She believes Peirce's greatest achievement was his exposition of "thirdness" as an ontological mediation between modern idealism and Scholastic realism and his theory of evolution as a continuity of physical and mental events. The volume closes with chapters on Peirce's mathematics, ethics, esthetics, philosophy of religion, theology, and psychology. Those chapters are not mere expositions but critical evaluations. To review Nynfa Bosco's criticisms would take us far beyond the limits of an historical review. Suffice it to say that her criticisms are acute as well as sympathetic, and that they reflect well some of the differences between Italian and American tendencies in philosophical analysis. For several reasons, in short, this work deserves to be known internationally. It probably deserves also to be translated, though a translator would find it difficult to maintain the liveliness of her Italian style, which makes reading the book a pleasure as well as an instruction. HERBERT W. SCHNEIDER Claremont, Calilornia L'Iddalism de Lachelier. By Gaston Mauchaussat. (Paris: Presses Universitaires, Biblioth6que de Philosophie Contemporaine [N.F. 18], 1961. Pp. 224.) This is really an intellectual biography of Jules Lachelier (1832-1918); it traces the development of his idealism from 1866 to 1913 and of his moral BOOK REVIEWS I13 philosophy from 1868 to 1918. According to Lachelier himself, there was a significant change in his thinking when, in 1875, he ceased being a teacher, but M. Mauchaussat finds significant elements of the later development even in his earliest works. In general, according to this account, there was a continuous development from subjective to Platonic idealism and from empirical ethics to his axiological theodicy. The documentation and exposition are detailed and precise. The figure of Lachelier emerges as an important historical link between the romantic idealism of the early nineteenth century and the objective value theory or "philosophie de l'esprit" of the twentieth. Though Lachelier himself seems to have forgotten or discounted the early influence on him of Maine de Biran, the author of this biography finds good evidence that his early "Berkeleyan" idealism was derived largely from Maine de Biran and led him to make a careful study of the empirical psychology of thinking and of the importance of habit. D~s 1858, lisant l'introduction du M6moire de Maine de Biran sur l'influence de I'habitude, il en tire cette cons6quence que les esprits ne peuvent d6velopper leurs diverses puissances que par leur union avec le corps et qu'en somme l'homme pense parce qu'il parle (p. 13). It is evident that Lachelier's primary concern was to find in an empirical idealism a mediator between dogmatic naturalism and the equally dogmatic "spiritualism" which the school of Victor Cousin had established in academic circles. It was Ravaisson who guided him in this search. His course at the Ecole Normale Superieur, to which he was called in 1864, gave him an opportunity to work... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:112 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY Gallie's Peirce and Pragmatism (1952). She believes that the translation of Peirce's theory of the categories into the conceptual framework of British empiricism and naturalism misrepresents Peirce's cosmology which had very peculiar traits--traits which the author associates with the Platonic tradition. She shows in detail how Peirce tried at first (1868) to relate his three categories to the Scotist, Scholastic, concepts of "essence" and (...) "substance," and how, in his various phaneroscopic experiments, he gradually repudiated the Scholastic languages and by 1902 was ready to interpret his three categories as an adequate ontology. What led Peirce in this direction was his critique of perceptual judgment. He realized that subject and object are in dynamical, social, and historical relation to each other. A logical object is, therefore, also a "dynamic object" or objective. This insight led him at first to regard his doctrine of signs and their interpretation as a humanist or idealist doctrine, for the idealists had also recognized objects as objectives. Nynfa Bosco is quick to appreciate that this interpretation of acts of knowing is closely related to Gentile's idealism. But gradually a more ontological and Platonic interpretation emerges in Peirce, until in the end "thirdness" is a modernist version of the reality of universals. She believes Peirce's greatest achievement was his exposition of "thirdness" as an ontological mediation between modern idealism and Scholastic realism and his theory of evolution as a continuity of physical and mental events. The volume closes with chapters on Peirce's mathematics, ethics, esthetics, philosophy of religion, theology, and psychology. Those chapters are not mere expositions but critical evaluations. To review Nynfa Bosco's criticisms would take us far beyond the limits of an historical review. Suffice it to say that her criticisms are acute as well as sympathetic, and that they reflect well some of the differences between Italian and American tendencies in philosophical analysis. For several reasons, in short, this work deserves to be known internationally. It probably deserves also to be translated, though a translator would find it difficult to maintain the liveliness of her Italian style, which makes reading the book a pleasure as well as an instruction. HERBERT W. SCHNEIDER Claremont, Calilornia L'Iddalism de Lachelier. By Gaston Mauchaussat. (Paris: Presses Universitaires, Biblioth6que de Philosophie Contemporaine [N.F. 18], 1961. Pp. 224.) This is really an intellectual biography of Jules Lachelier (1832-1918); it traces the development of his idealism from 1866 to 1913 and of his moral BOOK REVIEWS I13 philosophy from 1868 to 1918. According to Lachelier himself, there was a significant change in his thinking when, in 1875, he ceased being a teacher, but M. Mauchaussat finds significant elements of the later development even in his earliest works. In general, according to this account, there was a continuous development from subjective to Platonic idealism and from empirical ethics to his axiological theodicy. The documentation and exposition are detailed and precise. The figure of Lachelier emerges as an important historical link between the romantic idealism of the early nineteenth century and the objective value theory or "philosophie de l'esprit" of the twentieth. Though Lachelier himself seems to have forgotten or discounted the early influence on him of Maine de Biran, the author of this biography finds good evidence that his early "Berkeleyan" idealism was derived largely from Maine de Biran and led him to make a careful study of the empirical psychology of thinking and of the importance of habit. D~s 1858, lisant l'introduction du M6moire de Maine de Biran sur l'influence de I'habitude, il en tire cette cons6quence que les esprits ne peuvent d6velopper leurs diverses puissances que par leur union avec le corps et qu'en somme l'homme pense parce qu'il parle (p. 13). It is evident that Lachelier's primary concern was to find in an empirical idealism a mediator between dogmatic naturalism and the equally dogmatic "spiritualism" which the school of Victor Cousin had established in academic circles. It was Ravaisson who guided him in this search. His course at the Ecole Normale Superieur, to which he was called in 1864, gave him an opportunity to work... (shrink)

SummaryThe purpose of this article is to critically undermine two commonly held and closely related contentions regarding the British idealist tradition. The first is that the British idealist tradition went into rapid and terminal decline shortly after the outbreak of the First World War. The second is that J. A. Smith was largely responsible for it. These aims are achieved through a diachronic analysis of Smith's conception of human imperfection as well as an assessment of Smith's intellectual legacy. As this (...) article will show, contrary to the received view, Smith was a philosophical innovator who instigated an intellectual evolution within the British idealist. In particular, this article shows that Smith substituted aspects of his early Greenian philosophy with elements of Italian idealism. As a result, Smith was instrumental in moving British idealism away from its traditional underpinnings and towards more a Croce–Gentilian foundation. It is this neglected philosophical innovation which has given scholars the false impression of the tradition's collapse. By establishing Smith's intellectual innovation this article intends to show that Smith made a much more significant intellectual contribution to the philosophical tradition to which he belongs than has so far been recognised. (shrink)

Through clear explanation of its characteristic concepts and doctrines, and paying close attention to the published works of its philosophers, the volume ...

Musicians sometimes shake their heads in wonderment at the remarkable incidence of musical creativity that occurred in Germany and Austria between the years 1750 and 1900. One after another, a series of musical giants arose in rapid succession, each unique, and each exemplifying human artistic genius of the highest possible order. That the German-speaking world dominated music composition during this period is scarcely open to question. But it was not always this way. In the seventeenth century, the first phase of (...) the period which has come to be known as the Baroque, the Italians were dominant, and in the centuries before that the Flemish composers of the Renaissance and the high Middle Ages like Ockeghem and Josquin des Pres were second to none in importance. (shrink)

The philosophical legacy of Antonio Gramsci, co-founder of the Italian Communist Party, represents a significant contribution to Marxist philosophy. Gramsci breathes new life into the Marxist tradition by infusing Marxism with persistent strands of Italian political thought. Not only does Gramsci turn to the Marxist philosophy of Antonio Labriola, but, furthermore, he reaches outside the Marxist tradition to such non-Marxist thinkers as Giambattista Vico, Niccolo Machiavelli, Gaetano Mosca, Giovanni Gentile, and Benedetto Croce. In particular, it is through his (...) encounter with, and reformulation of, Crocean philosophy that Gramsci lays the foundation for his own open-ended critical philosophy which challenges the universalistic pretensions of traditional interpretations of Marxism as a closed system of unalterable scientific laws and immutable truths. (shrink)

Idealism is philosophy on a grand scale, combining micro and macroscopic problems into systematic accounts of everything from the nature of the universe to the particulars of human feeling. In consequence, it offers perspectives on everything from the natural to the social sciences, from ecology to critical theory. Heavily criticised by the dominant philosophies of the 20th Century, Idealism is now being reconsidered as a rich and untapped resource for contemporary philosophical arguments and concepts. This volume provides a comprehensive portrait (...) of the major arguments and philosophers in the Idealist tradition. The book demonstrates how Idealist philosophy provides a fruitful way of understanding contemporary issues in metaphysics, the philosophy of science, political philosophy, scientific theory and critical social theory. (shrink)

Contents Introduction: Why Idealism Matters Part 1: Ancient Idealism 1. Parmenides and the Birth of Ancient Idealism 2. Plato and Neoplatonism Part 2: Early Modern Idealism 3. Phenomenalism and Idealism I: Descartes and Malebranche 4. Phenomenalism and Idealism II: Leibniz and Berkeley Part 3: German Idealism 5. Immanuel Kant: Cognition, Freedom and Teleology 6. Fichte and the System of Freedom 7. Philosophy of Nature and the Birth of Absolute Idealism: Schelling 8. Hegel and Hegelianism: Mind, Nature and Logic Part 4: (...) British Idealism 9. British Absolute Idealism: From Green to Bradley 10. Personal Idealism: From Ward to McTaggart 11. Naturalist Idealism: Bernard Bosanquet 12. Criticisms and Persistent Misconceptions of Idealism 13. Actual Occasions and Eternal Objects: The Process Metaphysics of Alfred North Whitehead. Part 5: Contemporary Idealisms 14. Autopoiesis: Idealist Biology I 15. Autonomous Agents: Idealist Biology II 16. Contemporary Philosophical Idealisms. (shrink)

W. J. Mander presents the first ever synoptic history of British Idealism, the school of thought which dominated English-language philosophy from the 1860s to the early 20th century. He restores to its proper place this neglected period of philosophy, introducing the exponents of Idealism and explaining its distinctive concepts and doctrines.

This study of Collingwood and his work covers the full range and reach of his philosophical thought. Following Collingwood's education and his Oxford career, Skagestad considers his relationship with prominent Italian philosophers Croce and De Ruggiero and the British idealists. Taking Collingwood's publications in order, he explains under what circumstances they were produced and the reception of his work by his contemporaries and by posterity. Most importantly, Skagestad reveals Collingwood's relevance today, through his concept of barbarism as a perceptive (...) diagnosis of totalitarianism and his prescient warning of the rise populism in the 21st century. (shrink)

Léon Brunschvicg's contribution to philosophical thought in fin-de-siècle France receives full explication in the first English-language study on his work. Arguing that Brunschvicg is crucial to understanding the philosophical schools which took root in 20th-century France, Pietro Terzi locates Brunschvicg alongside his contemporary Henri Bergson, as well as the range of thinkers he taught and influenced, including Lévinas, Merleau-Ponty, de Beauvoir, and Sartre. Brunschvicg's deep engagement with debates concerning spiritualism and rationalism, neo-Kantian philosophy, and the role of mathematics in philosophy (...) made him the perfect supervisor for a whole host of nascent philosophical ideas which were forming in the work of his students. Terzi outlines Brunchvicg's defence of neo-Kantian judgement, historical analysis and the inextricability of the natural and humanist sciences to any rigorous system of philosophy, with wide-ranging implications for contemporary scholarship. (shrink)

German Idealism was one of the most fertile and important movements in the history of Western philosophy. This volume includes eleven chapters on all aspects and the period's most influential philosophers, including Kant and Hegel.

The turn of the nineteenth century marked a rich and exciting explosion of philosophical energy and talent. The enormity of the revolution set off in philosophy by Immanuel Kant was comparable, by Kant's own estimation, with the Copernican Revolution that ended the Middle Ages. The movement he set in motion, the fast-moving and often cantankerous dialectic of `German Idealism', inspired some of the most creative philosophers in modern times: including G.W.F. Hegel and Arthur Schopenhauer as well as those who reacted (...) against Kant - Marx and Kierkegaard, for example. This volume traces the emergence of German Idealism from Kant and his predecessors through the first half of the nineteenth century, ending with the irrationalism of Kierkegaard. It provides a broad, scholarly introduction to this period for students of philosophy and related disciplines, as well as some original interpretations of these authors. Each chapter is written by a distinguished scholar in the field. A glossary of technical terms together with a chronological table of philosophical, scientific and other important cultural events are provided. (shrink)

Dictionary entry of "Idealism" in the "New Dictionary of the History of Ideas".

The article analyses different forms of the theoretical paradigm of German Begriffsgeschichte. It focuses on the coherently formalized proposal made by Reinhard Koselleck, showing its relevance for the main Italian schools of interpretation. Koselleck is able to move beyond the historicist framework of Begriffsgeschichte on the basis of a theory of the Sattelzeit or Schwellenzeit--located between the eve of the seventeenth and the beginning of the eighteenth century--capable of orienting the reconstruction of the history of political concepts. This (...) presupposition, which refers to a theory of the 'Vorgriff' or historical conceptual reconstructions, draws upon and elaborates a key theme of the logic of the social sciences that was put forth by Max Weber. The possibility to adhere or not to this residual Weberian moment explains the two different modalities in which conceptual history has been interpreted in Italy: one pointing at the reconstruction of the conceptual framework of the nineteenth century, the other aiming at the philosophical-political reconstruction of the genesis, the historic limits and the crisis of the political concepts of Western modernity. (shrink)

Italian medical history in the age of positivism showed a strong interest in epidemics. This can be seen in Alfonso Corradi’s monumental Annali (1865-1895) and in works of other 19th-century historians who addressed major public health issues in the newly unified country. Local history was also widely practiced in Italy, and it was instrumental in discovering and publishing a wealth of documentation on past epidemic and endemic diseases, as well as on measures such as quarantines that were (...) invented or introduced in the peninsula as early as the late Middle Ages. The way Italian historians looked at epidemics in the 20th century was shaped by politics, religion and literature more than by demography, epidemiology, or technical knowledge in the medical field. This article and its accompanying bibliography will focus on regional historiography and deal with the history of plague, smallpox, cholera and malaria, and other diseases addressed in works published after the 1980s. (shrink)

This essay discusses the reception of Gentile's ideas in Britain before the Second World War, identifying the key figures and events that contributed to his enduring reputation. The central figure in Connelly's account is R.G. Collingwood, whose assessments of Gentile, sometimes enthusiastic, sometimes harshly critical, yet in fact deeply ambiguous, reflect the changing tenor of the debates over Italian neo-idealism in the Anglophone world.

This book is a treasure house of Italian philosophy. Narrating and explaining the history of Italian philosophers from the Middle Ages to the twentieth century, the author identifies the specificity, peculiarity, originality, and novelty of Italian philosophical thought in the men and women of the Renaissance. The vast intellectual output of the Renaissance can be traced back to a single philosophical stream beginning in Florence and fed by numerous converging human factors. This work offers historians and (...) philosophers a vast survey and penetrating analysis of an intellectual tradition which has heretofore remained virtually unknown to the Anglophonic world of scholarship. (shrink)

The Italian author Giovanni Gentile 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, 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. (shrink)

Introduction -- The end of history and the Kantian moment -- The progressive mind and the Islamist challenge -- The incoherence of the philosophers -- The language of progress and the closure of the European mind -- The networked global order -- All roads lead to China -- Maxims or axioms? -- The revenge of politics and the search for order -- Conclusion -- Afterword : the study of international relations and the erosion of acdemic integrity.

Philosophy of history is the conceptual and technical study of the relation which exists between philosophy and history. This paper tries to analyze and examine the nature of philosophy of history, its methodology and ideal development. In this I have tried to set the limits of knowledge to know the special account of Hegel’s idealistic view about philosophy of history. In this paper I have also used the philosophical methodology and philosophy inquiry, quest and hypothesis to (...) discuss the Hegel’s idealistic concept of philosophy of history. It also examines and demonstrates the views of other idealist philosophers like, Socrates, Plato and Aristotle. It also shows the how history of mathematics is a complementary of idealism as most of philosophers who were idealists are also great mathematicians. In this paper we are investigation the epistemological approach, logical and metaphysical approach to study the nature of history, meaning of history and structure of history. (shrink)

This article attempts to expose an unwarranted narrowness in the study of idealism in nineteenth century philosophy, and to show that the field of idealism is much wider than usually assumed. This narrowness stems from the influence of Hegel’s history of philosophy, which saw the idealist tradition as beginning in Kant, passing through Fichte and Schelling, and then culminating in his own system. This conception of history has been disseminated by Hegel’s followers and still prevails today. I argue (...) that this conception is too narrow for several reasons. First, it ignores the romantic idealists (Hölderlin, Novalis, Schlegel); second, it excludes the opposing tradition of idealism of Herbart, Fries and Beneke, which affirmed (against Schelling and Hegel) transcendental idealism, an empiricist epistemology, the existence of the thing-in-itself and the value of the Kantian dualisms; and, third, it neglects the history of idealism after Hegel later in the nineteenth century, more specifically, the idealism of Trendelenburg, Lotze and Hartmann. (shrink)