Sign-In
Cart
The Useful Fiction: Benedetto Croce and the Philosophy of Declared Reality
Paperback
Please select the version of book you would like to purchase.
ISBN13: 9798189163722
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Jul 26 2026
Pages: 394
Weight: 1.16
Height: 0.81 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Jul 26 2026
Pages: 394
Weight: 1.16
Height: 0.81 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
For forty years he was among the most formidable minds in Europe, a private citizen who ran the intellectual life of a nation from an apartment in Naples without holding a university chair, drawing a salary, or joining a party. A regime that murdered lesser critics broke into his house, wrecked his library, and did not dare touch him; he answered by calling it the rule of donkeys and going back to work. Then the century moved on, and Benedetto Croce was reduced to a single line in the textbooks: art is intuition.
The line that finished him was a different one. Croce said that the concepts of the natural sciences are not knowledge at all. They are useful fictions, convenient abbreviations adopted because they save labor, neither true nor false, no more descriptive of the world than a filing system is descriptive of the papers it holds. Philosophy never forgave him, and philosophy was right not to. It was also, in a way that has taken a hundred years to come into focus, arguing with the wrong half of what he said.
His verdict was indefensible. His diagnosis was not. Science does in fact run on components that nobody has measured, that are declared rather than discovered, and that carry far more weight in the published conclusions than the published conclusions tend to admit. Croce noticed this before anyone, from the wrong side of the argument, and then drew the one conclusion guaranteed to make him unhearable.
This is the story of a self-taught amateur who became a national institution, of the friendship with a fellow philosopher that ended with one of them serving fascism and the other opposing it, and of an argument its author got halfway right and left standing open - whether by accident or by design - for whoever came next. That turns out to be us.
Keywords: Benedetto Croce, philosophy of science, aesthetics, Italian history, antifascism, historiography, epistemology
His verdict was indefensible. His diagnosis was not. Science does in fact run on components that nobody has measured, that are declared rather than discovered, and that carry far more weight in the published conclusions than the published conclusions tend to admit. Croce noticed this before anyone, from the wrong side of the argument, and then drew the one conclusion guaranteed to make him unhearable.
This is the story of a self-taught amateur who became a national institution, of the friendship with a fellow philosopher that ended with one of them serving fascism and the other opposing it, and of an argument its author got halfway right and left standing open - whether by accident or by design - for whoever came next. That turns out to be us.
Keywords: Benedetto Croce, philosophy of science, aesthetics, Italian history, antifascism, historiography, epistemology
Also from
Kriger, Boris
Why We Don't Fly Like Birds: Gravity, Anatomy, and the Metaphysics of Freedom
Kriger, Boris
Paperback
$28.80
The Evil of Banality: Hannah Arendt, Frames, Awareness, and the Refusal to Look Away
Kriger, Boris
Paperback
$24.00
Freedom from Taxes: Introduction of Automated Payment Transaction Tax and Universal Basic Income
Kriger, Boris
Paperback
$9.60
Why the Universe Is Not a Lottery: Attractors and the End of Cosmic Coincidence
Kriger, Boris
Paperback
$30.00
The Arithmetic of Happiness: How Jeremy Bentham Tried to Count the Human Soul
Kriger, Boris
Paperback
$26.40
Cutting the Continuum: Zeno's Paradoxes from the Bounded Observer to the Edge of the Cosmos
Kriger, Boris
Paperback
$28.80
A Theory of the Cinematic Masterpiece in the Generative Era: Temporal Sovereignty, the Carriers of Density, and Why Technical Progress Makes Art Deare
Kriger, Peter
Halushko, Denys
Kriger, Boris
Paperback
$13.20
Absurd Faith for an Absurd World: The Tertullian Paradox in the Age of Unreason
Kriger, Boris
Paperback
$17.20
Guilty Until Proven Innocent: How Accusation Became the World's Favorite Pastime
Kriger, Boris
Paperback
$28.80
How Knowledge Breaks and Remakes Itself: Thomas Kuhn and the Secret Life of Scientific Change
Kriger, Boris
Paperback
$28.80
The Bluff of Decolonization in Controlled Chaos: Frantz Fanon and the Invisible Chains
Kriger, Boris
Paperback
$26.40
The Morality Trap: How Humanity's Noblest Idea Became Its Most Dangerous Weapon
Kriger, Boris
Paperback
$26.40
The Last Absolutism: Why Companies Are the Final Refuge of Autocracy
Kriger, Boris
Kaminski, Jaroslaw F.
Paperback
$28.80
The Law of Imperative Uncertainty: Why Any Complex World Requires Uncertainty
Kriger, Boris
Paperback
$23.88
Also in
Philosophy
In the Beginning Was the Deed: Realism and Moralism in Political Argument
Williams, Bernard
Paperback
$46.25
The American Indian Mind in a Linear World: American Indian Studies and Traditional Knowledge
Fixico, Donald Lee
Paperback
$72.79
Dreaming of Cinema: Spectatorship, Surrealism, and the Age of Digital Media
Lowenstein, Adam
Paperback
$51.00
Machine Intelligence and the Imaginal Realm: Spiritual Freedom and the Re-Animation of Matter
Lafitte, Luke
Paperback
From $14.99
The Sociogony: Social Facts and the Ontology of Objects, Things, and Monsters
Worrell, Mark P.
Paperback
$43.50
On Quality: An Inquiry Into Excellence: Unpublished and Selected Writings
Pirsig, Robert M.
Pirsig, Wendy K.
Hardcover
From $12.99
Philosophy in Turbulent Times: Canguilhem, Sartre, Foucault, Althusser, Deleuze, Derrida
Roudinesco, Elisabeth
Paperback
$42.00
The New Science of Giambattista Vico: Unabridged Translation of the Third Edition (1744) with the Addition of Practic of the New Science
Vico, Giambattista
Paperback
$43.43
Friendship and Society: An Introduction to Augustine's Practical Philosophy
Burt, Donald X.
Paperback
$28.49
The Dream of Reason: A History of Philosophy from the Greeks to the Renaissance
Gottlieb, Anthony
Paperback
$9.99
The Modes of Scepticism: Ancient Texts and Modern Interpretations
Annas, Julia
Barnes, Jonathan
Julia, Annas
Paperback
$48.84
Essays V2: Moral And Entertaining On The Various Faculties And Passions Of The Human Mind (1815)
Clarendon, Edward Hyde Earl of
Paperback
$37.44
The Daily Stoic: 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living
Hanselman, Stephen
Holiday, Ryan
Hardcover
From $12.99
The Mattering Instinct: How Our Deepest Longing Drives Us and Divides Us
Goldstein, Rebecca Newberger
Hardcover
From $19.99
The Obstacle Is the Way Expanded 10th Anniversary Edition: The Timeless Art of Turning Trials Into Triumph
Holiday, Ryan
Hardcover
$26.60
The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse Fifth Anniversary Limited Edition: The Global Bestseller
Mackesy, Charlie
Hardcover
$28.49
Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness
Godfrey-Smith, Peter
Paperback
$19.00
Self-Help from the Middle Ages: What the Seven Deadly Sins Can Teach Us about Living
Jones, Peter
Hardcover
$27.00
The Courage to Be Ordinary: Discover Your Surprising Superpower for a Thriving Life
Kishimi, Ichiro
Paperback
$18.04
My Big TOE Awakening Discovery Inner Workings: The Complete My Big TOE Trilogy Unifying Philosophy, Physics and Metaphysics
Campbell, Thomas
Hardcover
$56.53
The Ethical Slut, Third Edition: A Practical Guide to Polyamory, Open Relationships, and Other Freedoms in Sex and Love
Hardy, Janet W.
Easton, Dossie
Paperback
From $11.99
Revolt Against the Modern World: Politics, Religion, and Social Order in the Kali Yuga
Evola, Julius
Hardcover
$28.45
Self-Reliance and Nature: The Complete First and Second Series of Emerson's Essays
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Hardcover
$24.99
Make Your Home in This Luminous Dark: Mysticism, Art, and the Path of Unknowing
Smith, James K. A.
Hardcover
$26.60