Abstract

Precision, lucidity, richness of insight, and critical, objective judgment are, I think, some of the essential features of good philosophical thought. This book exemplifies, to a good extent, these features. In it the author tries to achieve two main goals: first, to distinguish what still “lives” in Croce’s philosophy “from what may be advantageously discarded, that is, the idealistic implications that he drew from his tenet that historical knowledge is self-knowledge.” Here Moss argues that “Croce’s idealist epistemological assumptions along with the coherence theory of truth that he derived from them, are not viable. Nevertheless his categorical conception of error provides a genuine contribution to contemporary philosophical thought.” Second, “Croce’s view that philosophy amounted to methodology and that the philosopher’s task was to delineate “categories of the real” is indeed consistent with the historical nature of reality.”