Gentile Giovanni (1875–1944), Italian idealist philosopher and educational reformer. He taught at the universities of Palermo, Pisa, and Rome, and became minister of education in the first years of Mussolini’s government (1922–24). He was the most influential intellectual of the Fascist regime and promoted a radical transformation of the Italian school system, most of which did not survive that era.
Gentile rejected Hegel’s dialectics as the process of an objectified thought. His actualism (or actual idealism) claims that only the pure act of thinking or the Transcendental Subject can undergo a dialectical process. All reality, such as nature, God, good, and evil, is immanent in the dialectics of the Transcendental Subject, which is distinct from Empirical Subjects. Among his major works are La teoria generale dello spirito come atto puro (1916; translated as The Theory of Mind as Pure Act, 1922) and Sistema di logica come teoria del conoscere (‘System of Logic as a Theory of Knowledge,’ 1917).
Gentile’s pedagogical views were also influenced by actualism. Education is an act that overcomes the difficulties of intersubjective communication and realizes the unity of the pupil and the teacher within the Transcendental Subject (Sommario di pedagogia come scienza filosofica, ‘Summary of Pedagogy as a Philosophical Science,’ 1913–14). Actualism was influential in Italy during Gentile’s life. With Croce’s historicism, it influenced British idealists like Bosanquet and Collingwood.
See also IDEALISM. P.Gar.