This attitude was reinforced, in the first half of the twentieth century, by the hegemony of the neo-Hegelian idealism of Benedetto Croce (1866–1952) and Giovanni Gentile (1875–1944), who saw science as possessing no philosophical significance. Croce contended that science produces only pseudo-concepts of practical utility. Such concepts were subordinate to truth, which was, in his opinion, the exclusive province of the sciences of the Spirit (namely art, literature, philosophy, and history), of which philosophy was the crown jewel. True knowledge rises above science, which is irremediably tied to a practical horizon. Giovanni Gentile similarly devalued science, which he saw as oscillating between art and religion, unable to unify the two in a higher synthesis such as that achieved by philosophy. For Gentile, science combined the defects of art, objectivity and universality, with those of religion, subjectivity and rationality, and was thus the fruit of multiple errors and devoid of any autonomous historical development.
This negation of science by Croce and Gentile proved widely influential, both because it was set in a traditionally antiscientific culture and because these two neo-idealists played leading roles in the opposing political movements of liberalism and fascism. Their thinking exerted an almost dictatorial authority and aggravated the general cultural devaluation of science and technology.
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