Elementi romantici nella estetica di Gentile

The following paper reproduces the unpublished text of a conference likely held by Scaravelli at
the Deutsch-Italienisches Kulturinstitut zu Köln (Petrarca-Haus) in 1939. The author’s will was to
introduce the German public to Gentile’s thought, presented as a newer and more appropriate version of a philosophy of spirit – a philosophy that was born with Kant’s Copernican revolution, which had first taken place in aesthetics and only subsequently in gnoseology, and that had been the starting point for Romantic culture. Setting aside Scaravelli’s critique of actualism, as expressed in Critica del capire, the Italian thinker identifies sentiment as the “condition of transcendental thought itself”, which had given a firmer cohesion to Gentile’s system.