La filosofia di Marx by Giovanni Gentile (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 4~3 proach to philosophical problems. The conceptual analysis of psychological concepts of ordinary language is not the only service the psychologist may expect from philosophy. What he primarily needs in order to avoid those hopeless starts and meaningless theories which Sigmund Koch deplored as typical shortcomings of psychology in his critical review of the historical efforts of his science is a realistic philosophy of man that offers basic information about the philosophical problems concerning the essential constitution of a human being and concerning the differentiation and relationships of the components of his existence. And it is this philosophy of man which our contemporary philosophy of mind, at least, overtly and publicly does not dare to risk. It is interesting to observe that the psychologists of the Conference, who were so eager in their condemnation of ordinary language philosophy, did not have any complaint about this deficiency of today's philosophy. Considering their work as scientific, they deny any relationship of psychology to philosophy and are unaware of the fact that their psychological methods and theories necessarily are expressions of some kind of a philosophy of man. As a whole, the papers of this Philosophy of Psychology do not bring many surprises. As was to be expected, they deal with certain aspects of the contemporary philosophy of mind, generally in an interesting and informative manner. However, a student of this philosophy of mind and of the meaning of empirical psychology will have to turn to more comprehensive and explicit studies of the problems discussed, both for a better understanding of the problems and of their present discussions. The Catholic University of America Washington, D. C. MARms ScHNEIDER, 0. F. M. La filosofia di Marx. By GIOVANNI GENTILE. A cura di V. A. Bellezza. Florence: Sansoni, 1974. L. 3,000. This volume contains not only the fifth edition of Gentile's Filosofia d1 Marx (first published in 1899) but also a long Appendix where the editor has collected various documents intended to provide some historical context for Gentile's book. La filosofia di Marx is the book that in 1915 was praised by Lenin as one of the most interesting works on Marx by nonMarxist philosophers. It is also the book whose first edition contained a dedication to Benedetto Croce expressing Gentile's gratitude for the many fruitful discussions they had had. Croce was at the time one of the leading interpreters and critics of Marx, as may be seen from his Historical Mater- 424 BOOK REVIEWS ialism and the Economics of Karl Marx (first published iu 1900). Thus in the first section of the Appendix the editor has collected all relevant correspondence between Gentile and Croce, consisting of 100 letters of various lengths covering a total of 94 pages. But those were " the good old days," that is, the times when Gentile and Croce were friends and collaborators, before the former's support for fascism and the latter's opposition broke their long friendship in the 19QO's. The editorial history of La filosofia di Marx reflects this, for in its second edition in 1987 the dedication to Croce of the first edition was taken out of its original place and appended as a footnote to the author's preface. Be that as it may, the rest of the Appendix in the present volume contains the following: six letters between Gentile and Antonio Labriola, a well-known Italian Marxist of the time; two letters between Gentile and Georges Sorel, a leading French Marxist whose interpretation of Marx overlaps with Croce's, though they had worked independently of one another; four book reviews by Gentile, including one of Kausky's Die Geschichte des Sozialismus in Einzelderstellungen (Stuttgart, 1895), and one entitled " Croce's Marxism " dealing with the third Italian edition of Croce's Historical Materialism and the Economics of Karl Marx of 1918; and a facsimile of one of Labriola's letters to Gentile. Gentile's work consists of two parts: the first is an examination of historical materialism, the second of the so-called philosophy of praxis. The apparent structure of the two essays is similar; in each case the examination is carried out in three steps: an...