Customer Reviews

Theory of Mind As Pure Act (Living Time Thought)

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I read a 1920s translation of this brilliant philosophical work by Gentile (more remembered for his wrong political leanings - fascism - than his contributions to philosophy).

The book is believed to be solipsist (the position that nothing exists except thought/self), but is not so.

Gentile does not deny the existency of world, history, etc. But he states that everything is ultimately a structure of consciousness and exists only through consciousness rather than independent of it. The question of existence of past, future, space, world, history etc., is ultimately a question of their existence as objects apprehended by consciousness which is in a continuous flux ('here' and 'now' keep changing by the moment they are uttered - a Hegelian position). If objects exist but consciousness does not exist (there is no apprehending subject mind), there existence is immaterial and cannot be ascertained or affirmed.

His philsophy stresses how past and future dissolve into the active moment of the mind in the present. He distinguishes 'thought thought' and 'thought thinking' and asserts that thought is not a closed fact as in 'thought thought' but an active process as in 'thought thinking'.

In this sense Gentile's position is Heraclitean in its focus on continuous flux of mind, Cartesian in its focus on cogito, and closer to phenomenology than solipsism. Gentile was inspired by Hegel's philosophy like his contemporary Croce but took it in a mentalistic direction. It also comes close to phenomenology in its denial of the noumenal.

This book cannot be read because the text is totally garbled. Text is totally mixed up; sentences are chopped up and incomplete. The publisher has a note in the inside cover declaring that this is just an OCRed copy. As such it should not be sold.