Antonio Giovanni Pesce 1 The Integral Philosophical Experience of Actualism Abstract: This essay explores the central role that Gentile assigns to concrete thinking. Through a combination of his- torical and theoretical interpretation, Pesce argues that Gen- tile’s radical ideas had their roots in great cultural shifts of the nineteenth century, and in particular in the widespread dissatisfaction with the reduced conception of the person that had arisen through the scientific advances of that period. Gentile’s stress on the richness of concrete thinking makes actualism an especially pertinent alternative to the empiri- cism and positivism that pervade mainstream thinking today. 1. Introduction All philosophy is the experience of a concrete human being and not of a mere gnoseological subject. That is: no thought is pure enough to tackle problems that are equally pure without them seeming to pose crucial challenges to the very existence of that thought. This concreteness of philosophical experience is the edifying aspect of a scien- tific text, to which Kierkegaard refers in his preface to Collingwood and British Idealism Studies, 20:1–2 (2014), pp. 45–72 1 Università di Catania, Italy, antoniogpesce@gmail.com. Copyright (c) Imprint Academic 2013 For personal use only -- not for reproduction