p In this chapter we shall deal with the philosophical conceptions of art of the leader of Italian neo-Hegelianism, Benedetto Croce, and of the leading representative of English neo-Hegelianism, Robin Collingwood. As will be shown in the course of the analysis, there are grounds to view Croce’s and Collingwood’s aesthetic conceptions as belonging to the mainstream of the semantic philosophy of art.

p The philosophy of a major Italian scholar, Benedetto Croce (1866-1952), is not usually considered within the context of the semantic orientation. The point is that, although problems of language and symbolism occupy an important place in his thought, they are nonetheless not the main theme of his “philosophy of the spirit”. All the same, his philosophy contains in embryo the main idea of semantic epistemology: that “expression” (language, symbolism) creates the object of cognition. As far as Croce’s aesthetics is concerned, its central idea of the inalienable unity of intuition and expression means for him the identity of art and language, and of the philosophy of art and the philosophy of language.

p Croce’s aesthetic views underwent constant changes throughout his long life. We can identify two basic landmarks in all these changes: Aesthetics as Science ot Expression and General Linguistics (the so-called “first aesthetics”), published in 1902, and La Poesia, Croce’s last major work on aesthetics, published in 1936. Below we shall consider the conception of art put forward in Aesthetics, since it is precisely in this work that the semantic thesis of the identity of art and language received its most developed treatment. 63 The changes made to this conception in La Poesia will be briefly characterized below (Ch. Ill, 2).

What led the Italian aesthetician to his notion of the identity of art and language? Croce himself later remarked that he first discovered the creative nature of language, and then identified art and language (20; 29; 41). A different opinion is held by the majority of commentators, who argue that Croce moved away from aesthetics towards language, and that he needed linguistics for a new substantiation of aesthetics. Leaving aside the question of how Croce arrived at his identification of art and language, it is possible to state that this thesis logically follows from Croce’s theory of intuition as expression.