borrowed from German idealism. Although realists admit that the external world is the only knowable one, enclosable within a "static" concept based on the repeatability of experience that would testify to the existence of a solid basis transcending the mutability of our perceptions, they continue to dogmatically assume that there is something real independently of the thought that thinks it. But a reality thought of as a "presupposition of thought," that is, thought of as "unthought" (being external, prior to thought), is a contradictory, dogmatic, and arbitrary concept that corresponds to the empirical point of view. Empiricism is an abstract point of view, because it separates the object from the ego, from the subject that posits it, and thus "abstracts" a part from the whole. The only concrete reality is the unitary synthesis of subject-object, which Gentile calls self-consciousness, in which it is possible to recompose the opposition between "thinking thought" and "thought thought", between "act" and "fact", or according to Gentile's terminology, between "concrete logos" and "abstract logos". Immediacy & Mediation The actual self-consciousness of thought is not immediate subjectivity, but mediated. Assuming the non-ego as opposite to the ego is in fact, at the beginning, an abstract and therefore immediate positing of thought that does not see itself in the objects of the world, a positing without mediation. Conversely, the transcendental (self-conscious) Ego is a mediated consciousness of itself, because it cannot subsist without consciousness of the other than itself, that is, of the world. Gentile rejects as abstract the Kantian table of the twelve categories, which depend in fact on the only true concrete judgment constituted by the I think (or aperception): Empirical self and transcendental self The transcendental self that operates this synthesis must be distinguished from the empirical self: the latter is an entity different from all the rest as well as from the other empirical selves, the transcendental self is on the contrary the universal subject, which can never be looked at from the outside, because it cannot be the object of our experience, like a show we attend as spectators, otherwise it will no longer be a subject but an object, a self indeed simply empirical. Even if we presume to objectify the subjective act of the Ego, we would still lower it to one of the many finite objects of knowledge. For this reason it is an act that can never be