"After criticising Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel so much for establishing a system of categories that predetermined the path that spiritual development had to follow, the neo-Hegelians of Italy were unable to do anything other than replace it with a more restricted set of categories from which we cannot escape. What a beautiful story, deluding itself that it is walking when in reality it is always standing still in the small circle of those few forms, marking its steps in a monotonous rhythm! But life has little respect for these a priori assumptions; it teaches us that spiritual categories, no less than the physical-mathematical categories of space, time, cause and quantity, are schemes that we construct to coordinate our experiences, and that they have nothing fixed, nothing necessary or eternal that can be deduced a priori."
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Academics from ItalyPoliticians from ItalyPhilosophers from ItalyHistorians from ItalyFascists from Italy
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Giovanni Gentile
Giovanni Gentile (30 May 1875 – 15 April 1944) was an Italian neo-Hegelian idealist philosopher, educator, and fascist politician, and a peer of Benedetto Croce. The self-styled "philosopher of Fascism", he was influential in providing an intellectual foundation for Italian Fascist thought, and ghostwrote part of The Doctrine of Fascism (1932) with Benito Mussolini.
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