Every philosophy has confronted the problem of uniting theory and practice.

Evidence

It is worth searching for, analysing and criticising the various forms in which the concept of the unity of theory and practice has been presented in the history of ideas, since it appears without doubt that every conception of the world and every philosophy has been concerned with this problem. Affirmation of Aquinas and Scholasticism: “Intellectus speculative extensione fit practicus ” (Theory by simple extension becomes practice—in other words, the affirmation of the necessary connection between the order of ideas and that of action). Aphorism of Leibniz, so often repeated by the Italian idealists, “Quo magis speculativa, magis practica ” [The more speculative, the more practical], in connection with science. The proposition of G. B. Vico, “verum ipsum factum ” [true is what is done], 441 so much discussed and variously interpreted (see Croce’s book on Vico and other polemical writings by Croce himself) and which Croce develops in the idealistic sense that knowledge is a form of doing and that one knows that which one does. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1297

Categorization

• DEFINE: The ‘unity of theory and practice’ concept is being introduced via its historical formulations — Aquinas, Leibniz, Vico.
• XREF: Connects to the later Gramsci passages on organic intellectuals and the philosophy of praxis as the resolution of this unity.