Zubiri was especially keen on unde rstanding what mathematics is, and what literature is,not in the operational terms often employed to describe them, but as knowledge about reality. Through his philosophy of sentient intelligence, he came to understand that in bothcases, a new reality is created which is then explored, and the essential ingredient ispostulation. This insight was only possible because Zubiri recognized that reality is not azone of things, but formality. Zubiri’s notion of postulated reality can be extended to (...) a thirdarea, political theory, where analysis reveals that key realities are postulated by the action of politically empowered entities, usually states. However, postulated reality in thisarea differs in some important ways from mathematics and literature. Zubiri tuvo gran interés en entender qué es la matemática, y qué es la literatura, no ensentido funcional, sino en sentido de saber acerca de la realidad. Por su filosofía de inteligencia sentiente, llegó a entender que en ambos casos, se crea una realidad nueva que seexplora después, y el ingrediente esencial es la postulación. Tal percepción solo fue posibleya que Zubiri se dio cuenta de la realidad no es una zona de cosas, sino formalidad. Su noción de realidad por postulación se puede extender a un campo tercero, la teoría de la polí-tica, donde el análisis revela que las realidades claves son postulados por acción de entidades autorizadas políticamente, en general, estados nacionales. Pero, la realidad postuladaen este campo difiere de la matemática y de la literatura en sentidos importantes. (shrink)

In one of his last published interviews before his death in 2001, Pedro Laín Entralgo expressed his admiration of Zubiri for his expertise in the latest philosophy and science without sacrificing his religious faith.1 Faith and cognition harmonize in Zubiri’s posthumously published course Estructura dinámica de la realidad,2 a work valuable for understanding his evolution as a whole. EDR incorporates much doctrinal material employed previously, as well as ideas to be developed in subsequent works. It belongs to the period of (...) Sobre la esencia ,3 yet points in the direction of Inteligencia sentiente.4 Having translated EDR to English, tried to paraphrase its less transparent passages, and annotated all its references to proper names, I have unexpectedly come into possession of unexplored keys to Zubiri’s cognitive insights. Further, in the learning process, I have found palpable errors in transcription from the oral to the written version of the work. However, these mistakes come as no surrprise in view of the great difficulties that Zubiri’s text obviously presented to its first editor, Diego Gracia Guillén, and has continued to present to me, as its second; for Zubiri’s course spans a dauntingly wide variety of fields: ontology, classical physics, topology,special and general relativity, quantum mechanics, astro-physics, embryology, paleoanthropology, philosophy of society, and philosophy of history. He joins Aristotle, Leibniz, Locke, Kant, and Hegel in commanding multiple disciplines of his times. Stimulated by criticism of Sobre la esencia as excessively static in its approach to being,5 Zubiri elaborates a philosophy of becoming in EDR, and the theme in itself requires cross-disciplinary study. The conceptual tools he has at hand come to him via two main sources: his background in philosophy and theology, acquired at the Madrid Seminary where he studied between 1915 and 1919, as well as his philosophy studies in Louvain and Rome; and his acquaintance as of 1919 with Ortega y Gasset,6 who unlocked to him contemporary Germanic philosophy and science. I shall discuss in order [1.] Zubiri’s debt to Scholasticism in EDR, [2.] contributions of Ortega to EDR, and [3.] the consequent Aristotelianism of EDR in nearly all its parts: Aristotle guides Zubiri in directions enabling him to correct the Stagirite with the latest philosophy and material science available to him so as to elaborate his own metaphysics of dynamism. (shrink)