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Benedetto Croce
Benedetto Croce
Benedetto Croce Born 25 February 1866 Pescasseroli, Italy 20 November 1952 (aged86) Naples, Italy 20th-century Western philosophy Hegelianism, Idealism, Liberalism, Historism
Died
Benedetto Croce (Italian:[benedetto krote]; 25 February 1866 20 November 1952) was an Italian idealist philosopher, and occasionally also politician. He wrote on numerous topics, including philosophy, history, methodology of history writing and aesthetics. He was a prominent liberal, although he opposed laissez-faire free trade, and had considerable influence on other prominent Italian intellectuals including both Marxist Antonio Gramsci and fascist Giovanni Gentile. He was President of PEN International, the worldwide writer's association from 1949 until 1952.
Benedetto Croce
Biography
Croce was born in Pescasseroli in the Abruzzo region of Italy. He came from an influential and wealthy family, and was raised in a very strict Catholic environment. Around the age of 16, he turned away from Catholicism and developed a personal view of spiritual life, in which religion cannot be anything but an historical institution where the creative strength of mankind can be expressed. He kept this position for the rest of his life. In 1883, an earthquake hit the village of Casamicciola on the island of Ischia near Naples, where he was on holiday with his family, destroying the home they lived in. His mother, father, and only sister were all killed, while he was buried for a very long time and barely survived. After the incident he inherited his family's fortune and much like Schopenhauer before him was able to live the rest of his life in relative leisure, enabling him to devote a great deal of time to philosophy as an independent intellectual writing from his palazzo in Naples. (Ryn, 2000:xi). There, he graduated in law at the University of Naples, while reading extensively in historical materialism. His ideas were spread at the University of Rome towards the ends of the 1890s by Professor Antonio Labriola. Croce was well acquainted with and sympathetic to the developments in European socialist thought exemplified by Filippo Turati, Anna Kuliscioff, Wilhelm Liebknecht, August Bebel, Friedrich Engels, Karl Kautsky and Paul Lafargue. Under the influence of Neapolitan born Gianbattista Vico's thoughts about art and history, he turned to philosophy in 1893. Croce also purchased the house in which Vico had lived. His friend, the philosopher Giovanni Gentile encouraged him to read Hegel. Croce's famous commentary on Hegel, What is Living and What is Dead in the Philosophy of Hegel, appeared in 1907.
Political involvement
As his fame increased, Croce was persuaded, against his wishes,Wikipedia:Verifiability to go into politics. He was appointed to the Italian Senate, a lifelong position, in 1910. (Ryn, 2000:xi). He was an open critic of Italy's participation in World War I, feeling that it was a suicidal trade war. Though this made him initially unpopular, his reputation was restored after the war and he became a well-loved public figure. He was Minister of Public Education between 1920 and 1921 in the 5th and last government headed by Giovanni Giolitti. Benito Mussolini took power just over a year after Croce's exit from government; Mussolini's first Minister or Public Education was Giovanni Gentile, an independent who later became a fascist and with whom Croce had earlier cooperated in a philosophical polemic against positivism. Gentile remained minister for only a year, but managed to launch a comprehensive reform of Italian education that was partly based on Croce's earlier suggestions. Gentile's reform remained in force well beyond the Fascist regime, and was only abolished in 1962. Croce was instrumental in the move to Naples' Palazzo Reale of the Biblioteca Nazionale Vittorio Emanuele III in 1923.
Benedetto Croce anti-intellectual and boorish tendencies of parts of the Fascist regime.[3] However Croce's description of Fascism as anti-intellectual ignored the fact that many Italian intellectuals at the time actively supported Mussolini's regime, including Croce's former friend and colleague Gentile. Croce also described Fascism as malattia morale (literally "moral illness"). When Mussolini's government adopted antisemitic policies in 1938, Croce was the only non-Jewish intellectual who refused to complete a government questionnaire designed to collect information on the so-called "racial background" of Italian intellectuals.
Philosophical works
His most interesting philosophical ideas are divided into three works: Aesthetic (1902), Logic (1908), and Philosophy of the practical (1908), but his complete work is spread over 80 books and 40 years worth of publications in his own bimonthly literary magazine, La Critica. (Ryn, 2000:xi[])
Benedetto Croce
History
Croce also held great esteem for Vico, and shared his view that history should be written by philosophers. Croce's On History sets forth the view of history as "philosophy in motion", that there is no greater "cosmic design" or ultimate plan in history, and that the "science of history" was a farce.
Beauty
Croce's work Breviario di estetica (The Essence of Aesthetic) appears in the form of four lessons (quattro lezioni), as he was asked to write and deliver them at the inauguration of Rice University in 1912. He declined the invitation to attend the event; however, he wrote the lessons and submitted them for translation, so that they could be read in his absence. In this brief, but dense, work, Croce sets forth his theory of art. He claimed that art is more important than science or metaphysics, since only the former edifies us. He felt that all we know can be reduced to logical and imaginative knowledge. Art springs from the latter, making it at its heart, pure imagery. All thought is based in part on this, and it precedes all other thought. The task of an artist is then to put forth the perfect image that they can produce for their viewer, since this is what beauty fundamentally is the formation of inward, mental images in their ideal state. Our intuition is the basis of forming these concepts within us. This theory was later heavily debated by such contemporary Italian thinkers as Umberto Eco, who locates the aesthetic within a semiotic construction.[6]
Selected quotations
"All history is contemporary history." "As an historian, [I] realize how arbitrary, fantastic and inconclusive are theories of race."
Selected bibliography
Materialismo storico ed economia marxistica (1900).# English edition: Historical Materialism and the Economics of Karl Marx. Whitefish, MT: Kessinger, 2004. See also: http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/croce/ L'Estetica come scienza dell'espressione e linguistica generale (1902), commonly referred to as Aesthetic in English. Logica come scienza del concetto puro (1909) Breviario di estetica (1912)
Benedetto Croce Saggio sul Hegel (1907), (1912)# English edition: What is Living and What is Dead in the Philosophy of Hegel, transl. by Douglas Ainslie. London: Macmillan, 1915. See also: Croce at the Marxists Internet Archive [7]. Teoria e storia della storiografia (1916). English edition: Theory and history of Historiography, translation by Douglas Ainslie, Editor: George G. Harrap. London (1921). Racconto degli racconti (first translation into Italian from Neapolitan of Giambattista Basile's Pentamerone, Lo cunto de li cunti, 1925) "Manifesto of the Anti-Fascist Intellectuals" (1 May 1925 in La Critica) Ultimi saggi (1935) La poesia (1936) La storia come pensiero e come azione (meaning History as thought and as action) (1938), translated in English by Sylvia Sprigge as History as the story of liberty in 1941 in London by George Allen & Unwin and in USA by W.W. Norton. The most recent edited translation based on that of Sprigge is Liberty Fund Inc. in 2000. The 1941 English translation is accessible online through Questia. Il carattere della filosofia moderna (1941) Filosofia e storiografia (1949)
Further reading
Parente, Alfredo. Il pensiero politico di Benedetto Croce e il nuovo liberalismo (1944). Myra E. Moss, Benedetto Croce reconsidered: Truth and Error in Theories of Art, Literature, and History ,(1987). Hanover, NH: UP of New England, 1987. Ernesto Paolozzi, Science and Philosophy in Benedetto Croce, in "Rivista di Studi Italiani", University of Toronto, 2002. Janos Keleman, A Paradoxical Truth. Croce's Thesis of Contemporary History, in "Rivista di Studi Italiani, University of Toronto, 2002. Giuseppe Gembillo, Croce and the Theorists of Complexity, in "Rivista di Studi Italiani, University of Toronto, 2002. Fabio Fernando Rizi, Benedetto Croce and Italian Fascism, University of Toronto Press, 2003. ISBN 978-0-8020-3762-6. Ernesto Paolozzi, Benedetto Croce, Cassitto, Naples, 1998 (translated by M. Verdicchio (2008) www.ernestopaolozzi.it) Carlo Schirru, Per unanalisi interlinguistica depoca: Grazia Deledda e contemporanei, Rivista Italiana di Linguistica e di Dialettologia, Fabrizio Serra editore, PisaRoma, Anno XI, 2009, pp.932 Matteo Veronesi, Il critico come artista dall'estetismo agli ermetici. D'Annunzio, Croce, Serra, Luzi e altri, Bologna, Azeta Fastpress, 2006, ISBN 88-89982-05-5 Roberts, David D. Benedetto Croce and the Uses of Historicism. Berkeley: U of California Press, (1987). Claes G. Ryn, Will, Imagination and Reason: Babbitt, Croce and the Problem of Reality (1997; 1986). R. G. Collingwood, "Croce's Philosophy of History" [8] in The Hibbert Journal, XIX: 263278 (1921), collected in Collingwood, Essays in the Philosophy of History, ed. William Debbins (University of Texas 1965) at 322. Roberts, Jeremy, Benito Mussolini, Twenty-First Century Books, 2005. ISBN 978-0-8225-2648-3.
Benedetto Croce
References
[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] Denis Mack Smith, "Benedetto Croce: History and Politics", Journal of Contemporary History Vol 8(1) Jan 1973 pg 47. See the detailed description in a letter by Fausto Nicolini to Giovanni Gentile published in It is a disdainful term for misgovernment, a late and satirical addition to Aristotle's famous three: tyranny, oligarchy, and democracy. For about a month in the so-called Second Badoglio government and again for a month in the Second Bonomi government. Gramsci, Antonio, Il materialismo storico e la filosofia di Benedetto Croce, Einaudi, 1966, p. 310. Umberto Eco, "A Theory of Semiotics" (Indiana University Press. 1976) http:/ / www. marxists. org/ reference/ archive/ croce/ http:/ / www. archive. org/ stream/ crocesphilosophy00colluoft#page/ n1/ mode/ 2up
External links
Fondazione Biblioteca Benedetto Croce (http://www.fondazionebenedettocroce.it/) Istituto Italiano per gli Studi Storici, founded by Benedetto Croce (http://www.iiss.it/) Online English translations of books by Croce (http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/webbin/book/ lookupname?key=Croce, Benedetto, 1866-1952) Works by Benedetto Croce (http://www.gutenberg.org/author/Benedetto+Croce) at Project Gutenberg Croce's Aesthetics (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/croce-aesthetics/) PEN International (http://pen-international.org/)
License
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