The present text surveys and reevaluates the meaning and scope of Ortega y Gasset’s philosophy. The chapters reveal the most important aspects of his history such as the Neokantian training he went thru in Germany as well as his discovery of Husserl’s phenomenology around 1912. The work also covers his original contributions to philosophy namely vital and historical reason - and the cultural and educational mission he proposed to achieve. The Spanish – and to a certain extent the European – (...) circumstance was the milieu from which his work emerged but this does not limit Ortega’s scope. Rather, he believed that universal truths can only emerge from the particulars in which they are embedded. The publication in 2010 of a critical edition of his Complete Works opened worldwide access for many unpublished manuscripts, and some of his lectures. There is renewed interest among students and researchers in Ortega and this book uniquely delivers scholarship on his content in English. (shrink)

In his explanation of human action Alfred Schutz resorts mainly to Max Weber’s notion of subjective meaning and Husserl’s notion of type. For him subjective meaning seems more important to understand human action than the fact that social actors internalize normative values. Accordingly, validity has mainly to do with projects of action, with fulfilled (or unfulfilled) expectations and to the stock of knowledge available, along with the actor’s system of relevances. This raises two characteristic Schutzian problems: 1) the relation between (...) the subjective meaning of an action and the objective criteria (namely, the juridical and the ethical ones) according to which any action can be evaluated; 2) the relation between an actor and his fellow human beings that arguably share the same system of relevances and act in the same normative framework. In this paper, I intend to offer an analysis of these issues, resorting mainly to Schutz’s 1934 book Der Sinnhafte Aufbau der Sozialen Welt, and in some unpublished manuscripts. (shrink)

O presente ensaio aborda o pensamento de Karl Leonhard Reinhold entre 1789 e 1792. Após um curto período em que apareceu como discípulo e divulgador da filosofia de Kant, Reinhold procurou conduzir o kantismo na direcção que lhe parecia a mais adequada para a resolução de dois problemas que Kant deixara em aberto: a clarificação da natureza da coisaemsi e o acabamento dos intentos sistemáticos da sua filosofia. Este último desiderato, Reinhold procurou resolvêlo por meio de uma teoria da faculdade (...) representativa. Este ensaio procura também mostrar de que forma a filosofia de Reinhold estimulou o surgimento das interpretações especulativas do pensamento kantiano, nos grandes sistemas do idealismo alemão. (shrink)

This paper addresses the meaning of Husserl’s idealism between the Ideas of 1913 and the Cartesian Meditations of 1931. In the work of 1913, the idealism stems from a distinction between consciousness and world based in a difference in the corresponding modes of giveness: consciousness gives itself absolutely and without profiles, and the world is given as an identity pole of a multiplicity of profiles. The fact that Husserl offered a second definition of his idealism in the same work proves (...) that he thought the first one was not sufficient to ground the kind of idealism he was committed to. According to this second definition, consciousness is an absolute being that nulla res indigent ad existendum, while the world has a relative and contingent being. In 1931 the Cartesian Meditations give the final clue to the understanding of these earlier definitions. Husserls sharply distinguishes his phenomenological idealism from the Berkeleyan and Kantian ones and defines it as a thorough explicitation of the Ego as a constitutive agency, so that the «world that really is» is «the world constituted by consciousness». (shrink)

Este ensaio tem como objectivo apresentar, num primeiro momento, os resultados da análise intencional do processo de constituição dos objectos físicos, do corpo somático e da psique, tal como ela foi levada a cabo por Edmund Husserl. Na base desses resultados, será possível elaborar uma teoria da afecção que permitirá, num segundo momento, algumas aproximações com a Psicanálise de Freud e a teoria freudiana das pulsões. A especificidade do corpo somático relativamente a qualquer objecto físico – apesar de algumas semelhanças (...) no seu modo de doação – revela-se, acima de tudo, na experiência do corpo próprio e nas modalidades de vivência das afecções. Em particular, o enfraquecimento ou obscurecimento destas últimas colocam a questão da existência de um «inconsciente fenomenológico», cujas relações com o inconsciente de Freud, num terceiro e último momento do ensaio, se tentarão pôr em evidência. (shrink)

My purpose in this paper is to determine if there is still a place for God, in Husserl’s phenomenology, after the achievement of the phenomenological reduction. There are several different ways to address this issue. One can begin by asserting that there is no place in phenomenology, after bracketing the natural world of our lived experience, for any transcendence that is not, either the transcendence of the noema regarding the stream of consciousness in which it was generated, or the worldly (...) or mundane transcendence. One can also stress that the absolute consciousness that constitutes all kinds of objectivities – real or ideal – cannot tolerate at his side another absolute like the Christian God. Against these views, one can oppose the following: 1) in the intersubjective experience, the process of constitution of its specific noemata – the alter egos – goes beyond what seemed admissible in the standard intentional analysis of the process of constitution of worldly objectivities; 2) intentional consciousness shows an overall teleological structure that points beyond the simply given. In this paper, I try to explore the possibilities this opens in the core of intentional analysis to a phenomenological approach to God. (shrink)

O presente ensaio aborda o pensamento de Karl Leonhard Reinhold entre 1789 e 1792. Após um curto período em que apareceu como discípulo e divulgador da filosofia de Kant, Reinhold procurou conduzir o kantismo na direcção que lhe parecia a rnais adequada para a resolução de dois problemas que Kant deixara em aberto: a clarificação da natureza da coisaem-si e o acabamento dos intentos sistemáticos da sua filosofia. Este último desiderato, Reinhold procurou resolvê-lo por meio de uma teoria da faculdade (...) representativa. Este ensaio procura também mostrar de que forma a filosofia de Reinhold estimulou o surgimento das interpretações especulativas do pensamento kantiano, nos grandes sistemas do idealismo alemão. /// The present paper offers a survey of Karl Leonhard Reinhold's thought between 1789 and 1792. After a short period of time in which he emerged as a disciple and follower of Kant s philosophy, Reinhold tried to drive Kantianism in the direction that seemed to him the more appropriate to solve two problems left open by Kant: the clarification of the nature of the thing-in-itself and the final achievement of the systematic intents of his philosophy. This he tried to accomplish through the means of a theory of the faculty of representation. This paper tries also to show how Reinhold's philosophy stimulated the appearance of the speculative interpretations of Kant's thought in the great systems of the German Idealism. (shrink)