The article illustrates the presence of Duhem’s thought in Italian philosophical culture until the Great War. This presence was very scarce, so we must speak of an absence. One can identify the causes of this absence with the fact that all the great Italian philosophical currents, in different ways, have had little interest or been manifestly opposed to the tensions that came from abroad after the great discussion about the crisis of mechanicism in which Duhem was an important protagonist.

This essay aims to introduce Giovanni Gentile to scholars of Gramsci studies broadly and Gramsci‐education studies more specifically. The largest part of the essay explores Gentile's academic life, his philosophical agenda, and his political career. Having established a basis for understanding the educational reform Gentile enacted as Mussolini's first Minister of Public Instruction, the essay then surveys the substantial contemporaneous and contemporary English‐language material about it. The essay engages this literature only lightly and briefly in conclusion, for the primary purpose (...) of illustrating the danger of eschewing it. (shrink)