Ugo Spirito, the Italian idealist philosopher, was born in Arezzo. He began his academic career as assistant to Giovanni Gentile at Rome and first established his reputation as an acute interpreter and trenchant defender of "actual idealism." He was also one of the founders of "corporative" economic studies in fascist Italy and always maintained an active interest in economics and in political and social science.

Spirito held that Gentile's "pure act" was not merely a philosophical concept but was also necessarily a concept of philosophy itself as an activity. This belief led Spirito in 1929 to proclaim the identity of philosophy and science, because all actual knowledge must be the solution of a determinate historical problem and neither philosophy nor science as they occur in actual experience can claim an absolute status independent of the history of their genesis and of the progress of further...