To Transcend Experience Into the Orbit of Thought

The Timeliness of Gustavo Bontadini’s Essential Idealism

Abstract

Gustavo Bontadini (1903-1990) interpreted idealism as the fulfillment of modern philosophy. Idealism, understood in an “essential” and not “rhetorical” sense, is the thesis according to which thought is the manifestation of being. Experience is the immediate realization of thought. If we consider experience in a strictly phenomenological sense, it becomes the starting point of an inference that leads thought to recognize a transcendent reality, which turns out to be freely creative of the experience itself.