THE FORMATION OF SCIENTIFIC CONCEPTS IN BENEDETTO CROCE’S EPISTEMOLOGY IN THE LIGHT OF THE IDEALIZATIONAL CONCEPTION OF SCIENCE
THE FORMATION OF SCIENTIFIC CONCEPTS IN BENEDETTO CROCE’S EPISTEMOLOGY IN THE LIGHT OF THE IDEALIZATIONAL CONCEPTION OF SCIENCE

Summary/Abstract: During the first half of the 20th century Italian philosophy was dominated by the neo-idealist currents of Benedetto Croce and Giovanni Gentile and, as it is well known, these two Italian philosophers used to conceive philosophy as the queen of sciences, a kind of philosophia prima of Aristotelic memory. Their philosophical systems turned into a kind of attack to the cognitive value of science but while Gentile attributed to science its proper cognitive and theoretical value, Croce, at the opposite, used to demonize science because, according to him, it uses only pseudo-concepts that say us nothing about the world, and in this respect they are not true but rather useful. In this essay I will try to explain how Croce, in this case, was wrong and in order to do that I will use Leszek Nowak’s conceptual apparatus, that is to say the epistemological assumptions of the so-called method of idealization and gradual concretization.

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