Giovanni Gentile

Giovanni Gentile , 1875-1944, Italian philosopher and educator. He taught philosophy in several Italian universities and for many years contributed to the magazine of Benedetto Croce. In 1920 he founded the Giornale critico della filosofia italiana. An early supporter of the Fascist movement, he has been called the philosopher of Fascism. In 1922 he was made a senator and until 1924 was minister of public instruction. While in this office he reformed the structure of public education. He also directed the work of the new Enciclopedia italiana. Gentile's philosophy, called actual idealism, is a form of neo-Hegelian idealism and was developed in Teoria generale dello spirito come atto puro (1916, tr. The Theory of Mind as Pure Act, 1922).

Bibliography: See studies by H. S. Harris (2d ed. 1966), M. E. Brown (1966), and W. A. Smith (1970).

Gentile, Giovanni (1875–1944), Italian philosopher. An early Fascist, as Minister of Education (1922–4) he reintroduced the teaching of Catholicism in State schools. He developed his Idealist philosophy in conjunction with B. Croce. Reality, which was fundamentally historical, was the idea as realized in the human mind. God was the ‘transcendent pure thinking’; religion was a complete intuition of life, and the Catholic form of it was especially suited to the needs of the Italian people.