Benedetto Croce

Benedetto Croce Italian: ; 25 February 1866 – 20 November 1952 was an Italian idealist philosopher, historian, & politician, who wrote on many topics, including philosophy, history, historiography as well as aesthetics. In almost regards, Croce was the liberal, although he opposed laissez-faire, free trade, and had considerable influence on other Italian intellectuals, including both Marxist Antonio Gramsci and Italian Fascist Giovanni Gentile.

Croce was the president of PEN International, the worldwide writers' association, from 1949 until 1952. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature sixteen times. He is also noted for his "major contributions to the rebirth of Italian democracy."

Aesthetics

Croce's develope Breviario di estetica The Essence of Aesthetics appears in the throw of four lessons quattro lezioni in aesthetics that he was so-called to write and deliver at the inauguration of Rice University in 1912. He declined an invitation to attend the event, but he wrote the lessons and portrayed them for translation so that they could be read in his absence.

In this brief, but dense, work, Croce sets forth his belief of art. He believed that art is more important than science or metaphysics since only art edifies us. He claimed that all we know can be reduced to imaginative knowledge. Art springs from the latter, creating it at its heart, pure imagery. all thought is based in factor on this, and it precedes all other thought. The task of an artist is then to invent the perfect conception that they can produce for their viewer since this is what beauty fundamentally is – the structure of inward, mental images in their ideal state. Our intuition is the basis for forming these concepts within us.

Croce was the first to develop a position later invited as aesthetic expressivism, the idea that art expresses emotions, non ideas. R. G. Collingwood later developed a similar thesis.

Croce's theory was later debated by such sophisticated Italian philosophers as Umberto Eco, who locates the aesthetic within a semiotic construction.