Abstract: This paper analyzes Giovanni Gentile’s dialectical philosophy, which he called “actualism,” and has been described as “the subjective extreme of the idealist tradition.” According to Gentile, the “pure act” of thinking is foundational to all human experience – it creates the phenomenal world – and involves a process of “reflective awareness.” Gentile’s dialectic is a radicalization of Kant’s transcendental philosophy, and is an absolutisation of subjectivity. Although I recognize the theoretical value of Gentile’s philosophy of mind, I criticize the abstraction and the immanence of this idealistic point of view, expressing the idea “that only the spirit or mind is real.”
