30 Facts About Giovanni Gentile

Giovanni Gentile helped found the Institute of the Italian Encyclopedia with Giovanni Treccani, and was its first editor.

Giovanni Gentile was shot dead in 1944 by partisans of the Italian resistance.

Giovanni Gentile won a fierce competition to become one of four exceptional students of the prestigious Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa, where he enrolled in the Faculty of Humanities.

Giovanni Gentile was largely uninvolved with politics prior to the outbreak of World War One; he saw himself as a conservative liberal in the vein of Cavour, but mostly concerned himself with writing on the matters of education.

Giovanni Gentile saw the war as the emergence of a new Italy, which had to fight and destroy the "easy-going, idle Italy", "known for its faint-hearted nature, its individualism, its poor sense of taste and its tendency to withdraw into private egoism"; it was a chance to complete the Risorgimento and uphold its ideals.

Giovanni Gentile was indignant at the rejection of Italy's claims, set out in the 1915 Treaty of London, at the Paris Peace Conference.

In 1922, on the recommendation of Benedetto Croce, who had refused the role himself, Giovanni Gentile was named Minister for Public Education for the government of Benito Mussolini.

Giovanni Gentile officially joined the National Fascist Party in 1923.

Giovanni Gentile resigned his position in 1924 during the Matteotti Crisis.

In 1925, Giovanni Gentile headed two constitutional commissions that helped establish the corporate state of Fascism as part of the Exceptional Fascist Laws, and was a member of the Fascist Grand Council from 1925 to 1929.

Giovanni Gentile was described by Mussolini, and by himself, as "the philosopher of Fascism"; he was the ghostwriter of the first part of the essay "The Doctrine of Fascism", attributed to Mussolini.

Giovanni Gentile wrote the Manifesto of the Fascist Intellectuals which was signed by a number of writers and intellectuals, including Luigi Pirandello, Gabriele D'Annunzio, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti and Giuseppe Ungaretti.

Giovanni Gentile lost favour for remarking that fascism was a minority movement and was further sidelined following the Lateran Treaty, with his anti-clericalism no longer appropriate if the regime was to maintain the support of the Catholic Church.

Giovanni Gentile remained loyal to Mussolini and continued to support him even after the fall of the Fascist government in 1943, following him in the establishment of the Republic of Salo, a puppet state of Nazi Germany, and accepted an appointment in its government despite having criticized its anti-Jewish laws.

Giovanni Gentile was the last president of the Royal Academy of Italy.

On 30 March 1944, Giovanni Gentile received death threats blaming him for the execution of the Martyrs of Campo di Marte by Republic of Salo troops and accusing him of promoting fascism.

When Giovanni Gentile lowered the car window to speak to them, he was immediately hit with several bullets to the chest and heart, killing him.

Giovanni Gentile was buried in the church of Santa Croce in Florence.

Whereas it was common in the philosophy of the time to see the conditional subject as abstract and the object as concrete, Giovanni Gentile postulated the opposite, that the subject is concrete and the object a mere abstraction.

Giovanni Gentile was, because of his actualist system, a notable philosophical presence across Europe during his time.

Benedetto Croce objected that Giovanni Gentile's "pure act" is nothing other than Schopenhauer's will.

Therefore, Giovanni Gentile proposed a form of what he called "absolute Immanentism" in which the divine was the present conception of reality in the totality of one's individual thinking as an evolving, growing and dynamic process.

Many times accused of solipsism, Giovanni Gentile maintained his philosophy to be a Humanism that sensed the possibility of nothing beyond what was colligate in perception; the self's human thinking, in order to communicate as immanence is to be human like oneself, made a cohesive empathy of the self-same, without an external division, and therefore not modelled as objects to one's own thinking.

Giovanni Gentile considered Fascism the fulfilment of the Risorgimento ideals, particularly those represented by Giuseppe Mazzini and the Historical Right party.

Giovanni Gentile sought to make his philosophy the basis for Fascism.

Giovanni Gentile placed himself within the Hegelian tradition but sought to distance himself from those views he considered erroneous.

Giovanni Gentile criticized Hegel's dialectic, and instead proposed that everything is Spirit, with the dialectic residing in the pure act of thinking.

Giovanni Gentile believed Marx's conception of the dialectic to be the fundamental flaw of his application to system making.

The dialectic to Giovanni Gentile could only be something of human precepts, something that is an active part of human thinking.

Giovanni Gentile thought this was absurd, and that there was no 'positive' independently existing dialectical object.