The Theory of Mind as Pure Act
- Language:
- English
- Translation:
- H. Wildon Carr
- Status:
- Complete work
- Authorship:
- Written by the author
- Condition of the text:
- No scanning noise detected (automatic measure over the whole text, not checked by hand)
- Extent:
- ~100,000 words · 485 passages
Cite this work
- APAGiovanni Gentile. (n.d.). The Theory of Mind as Pure Act (H. Wildon Carr, Trans.). Digital reproduction: SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/giovanni-gentile/the-theory-of-mind-as-pure-act
- MLAGiovanni Gentile. The Theory of Mind as Pure Act. Translated by H. Wildon Carr. Digital reproduction, SigPhi, https://sigphiai.com/en/works/giovanni-gentile/the-theory-of-mind-as-pure-act.
- ChicagoGiovanni Gentile. The Theory of Mind as Pure Act. Translated by H. Wildon Carr. Digital reproduction, SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/giovanni-gentile/the-theory-of-mind-as-pure-act.
Reference to the edition that SigPhi reproduces: SigPhi is its digital reproduction, not its publisher. The edition's year is not in the metadata (hence "n.d."), and the translator appears only when recorded.
What it is about
Gentile's central work, of 1916, where he takes idealism all the way: there is nothing outside the act of thinking while it is being thought.
Context and history
His 'actualism' holds that everything that exists exists within the present act of thought, and that a thought already thought is not thought but thing. From this comes a philosophy of education and of history that was very influential in Italy. That is one part of what must be known; the other is that Gentile was Mussolini's minister of education in 1922, drew up the 'Manifesto of the Fascist Intellectuals' in 1925, and wrote the doctrinal part of the article 'Fascism' in the Italian Encyclopaedia signed by Mussolini. He was shot by partisans in 1944. He is in the corpus because he is a real piece of the history of ideas and because his philosophy can be argued with on its own terms; to read him without knowing the rest would be to read him badly.
Editorial context, not a citable source: unlike the passages of the work itself, these statements cannot be checked against the corpus.
came himself to deny the ideality of the real. In § 2. Berkeley's declaring that reality is not properly an self-contra- object of the human mind and contained diction. therein, nor, strictly speaking, a thought of that mind, but the totality of the ideas of an objective, absolute Mind, whose existence the human mind pre supposes, he contradicted the fundamental principle of his whole thought. Berkeley, indeed, even while saying esse est percipi, even while making reality coincide with perception, distinguished between the thought which actually thinks the world, and the absolute, eternal Thought, which transcends single minds, and makes the development of single minds possible. From the empirical point of view, at which, as a pre-Kantian idealist, Berkeley remained, it is obvious, and appears incontrovertible, that our mind does not think all the thinkable, since our mind is a human mind and therefore finite and the minds of finite beings exist only within certain limits of time and space. And then, too, we are able to think there is something which exists, even though actually it may never yet have been thought. It seems undeni able, then, that our mind has not as the present object of its thought everything which can possibly be its object. And since whatever is not an object of human thinking at one definite, historical, empirical, moment, seems as though it may be such an object at another EMPIRICAL IDEALISM 3 EMPIRICAL IDEALISM 3 such moment, we come to imagine another thinking outside human thinking, a thinking which is always thinking all the thinkable, a Thought which transcends human thought, and is free from all the limits within which it is or can be circumscribed. This eternal, infinite, thinking is not a thinking like ours which feels its limits at every moment. It is God's thinking.…