SOURCE: “The Philosophy of Giovanni Gentile,” in The Personalist, Vol. XI, No. 3, July, 1930, pp. 185-92.

In the following essay, Evans presents an overview of Gentile's philosophical system.

Philosophy should yield a concrete notion of the meaning of reality. This is the aim of Gentile. His philosophy, he tells us, is actual idealism, for it considers the absolute idea to be an act; or equally well it may be described as an absolute spiritualism, for only if the idea is act is all reality spirit. He sets out from the identification of the Hegelian Becoming with the act of thought, for Becoming and not Being is Hegel's first concrete logical category.¹

Such a concrete idealism means, according to Gentile, that the thinking of the philosopher is reasonable but not narrowly intellectual. It must contain not merely “mind,” but “the good spiritual disposition, what we call heart, good will, charity...