The Philosophy of the Practical: Economic and Ethic

Benedetto Croce's Philosophy of the Spirit, in the English translation by Douglas Ainslie, consists of 4 volumes (which can be read separately): 1. Aesthetic as science of expre...

The practical and the so-called third spiritual form: feeling--Various meanings of the word: feeling, a psychological class--Feeling as a state of the spirit--Function of the co...

But this mode of existence with which the practical activity manifests itself in life, as though physically limited, has no certainty, when separated from the theoretical life,...

There also exists another meaning of the word "feeling," of which, at present at any rate, we do not take account. This appears when the word is used to designate _the state_ of...

Now it is undeniable that we in fact possess the above-mentioned concepts and judgments. But what we must absolutely deny is that they differ in any respect from other concepts...

If the intention cannot be separated from the volition, because this belongs to the real and not to the imaginary, and proceeds from the known and never from the unknown, there...

The current proposition that we cannot act without _foreseeing_ is also incorrect. Since the conception of foreseeing is contradictory, and since we cannot know a fact if it be...

The intellectual element, which is constitutive in the practical judgment as in every other historical judgment, can also be called the philosophical element. Hence the conseque...

_Casuistic_ has had the same fate as the rules, and was also at one time responsible for a very copious literary production. Now it is cultivated as literature only by a few Jes...

In all these answers to questions, we have not made our imaginary philosopher commit any blunder; we have indeed put into his mouth things that we believe to be all of them most...

But the efforts of ancient and modern philosophers rigorously to define empirical concepts afford more interest than the external form of treatment, as do their efforts to modif...

The relations of the practical form with the other forms of the spirit having been examined, it is now necessary to re-enter, so to speak, the interior of the volitional activit...

Since, then, the volitional act is freedom, the question as to whether in a given case an individual has or has not been free, is equivalent to this other question: _Has there r...

There is no less opportunity and interest in making clear that relation, from the point of view of the negative term, or of evil. A series of descriptive concepts then appears,...

Just because the passions are possible volitions and therefore always have a definite content, it is no slight error on the part of writers of treatises, to consider joy and sor...

But before it acquired, as a vague and confused formula, so great a publicity as quite to amount to popularity, a philosopher of genius had analyzed and synthetized it, induced...

All this now becomes a simple consequence of the connection that has been made clear between desire and action. The cognoscitive spirit, when it apprehends and ideally remakes t...

As to the other concepts and to the disputes to which they gave rise, it will be opportune to mention repentance and remorse. Spinoza does not see that it has value as a necessa...

They constitute therefore the circle of reality and of life, which is duality-unity of thought and being, of subject and object, in such a way that to think the subject is the s...

The impossibility of suppressing the economic or the moral form of the activity in our practical consciousness, the continual appeal that the one makes to the other, the revolvi...

Since then, owing to the unalterably practical character of the utilitarian fact, it was not possible to insist upon its reduction to the technical, and since, on the other hand...

What has been said of the relation between pleasure and morality, is to be repeated of the other between happiness and virtue, a relation that is identical with the preceding, f...

All those acquainted with economic studies will have recognized in the concepts that we have explained, the _logical motives_ of the history of Economy, the divisions, the polem...

Utilitarianism is principally represented by English thought, to which belongs Hobbes, the greatest of all utilitarians, who proclaimed, _in statu naturae_ (that is to say, in g...

VI. Certainly economic science, owing to its empirico-quantitative character, already noted, was not made to fill the void and to furnish a more positive and exact concept of th...

The ethical principle is not adequately expressed, either by the _altruistic_ concept, or by that of _natural formations_ and of _institutions,_ or by that of the _gods;_ becaus...

In this too, his predecessors are to be found in traditional philosophy of Christian origin, or, if it be preferred, Platonic (opposition of material to formal Ethic can already...

The exclusion of the character of sociality from the concept of law frees philosophy from a series of problems, grafted upon that pretended character. The principal of these was...

We must recognize examples of the second kind of error in the discussions constantly held as to social or political institutions, when instead of combating them as irrational, o...

And this is what happens. At every moment of life we find ourselves face to face with actual situations, to which the laws that we possess either do not apply at all, or apply o...

But this failure of recognition has not prevented the appearance and persistence of the problem of the _combined unity and distinction of law and morality,_ which has been the m...

It was completely developed and reasoned out, with all the strictness that its erroneity permitted, in the doctrines of Kant and Fichte, who were the greatest of Thomas's schola...

Jacobi represents this attitude in several of his writings, with great elevation of soul, and especially in the _Woldemar_ (1779, 1794-96), the most lively protest that has ever...

[25] Rümelin, _Reden u. Aufsätze,_ new series (Freiburg i. B., 1881), p. 342; Jellinek, _Allgemeine Staatslehre_ (Berlin, 1900), p. 302 _sq.;_ Stammler, _Lehre v. richtig. Recht...