Benedetto croce philosophy of education

1. The Four Domains of Spirit (or Mind)

We are confining ourselves to Croce’s aesthetics, but it will help to have at least the most rudimentary sketch in view of his rather complex general philosophy.

In Italy at the beginning of the twentieth century, the prevailing philosophy or ‘world-view’ was not, as in England, post-Hegelian Idealism as already mentioned, but the early forms of empiricist positivism associated with such figures as Comte and Mach.

Partly out of distaste for the mechanism and enshrinement of matter of such views, and partly out of his reaction, both positive and negative, to the philosophy of Hegel, Croce espoused what he called ‘Absolute Idealism’ or ‘Absolute Historicism’.

A constant theme in Croce’s philosophy is that he sought a path between the Scylla of ‘transcendentalism’ and the Charybdis of ‘sensationalism’, which for most purposes may be thought of as