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 The publication in 2010 of a critical edition of his Complete Works opened worldwide access for many unpublished manuscripts, and some of his lectures.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an analysis of these issues, resorting mainly to Schutz’s 1934 book Der Sinnhafte Aufbau der Sozialen Welt, and in some unpublished manuscripts.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)

In this paper I will focus on Adolf Reinach’s work A Priori Foundations of Civil Law. Reinach, a member of the so-called “Circle of Göttingen”, formed around Edmund Husserl, sought in this work to apply phenomenology, understood as a doctrine of essences, to the problem of the constitution of legal norms. Surprisingly, however, his starting point is an analysis of the promise – whose legal status is weak, appearing only in some civil codes (as the Portuguese), in expressions such as (...) “promise of sale” – and the Verbindlichkeit it establishes between the one who makes the promise and the person who is promised something. Between promise and its fulfilment Reinach establishes a logical relation of cause and consequence, although he claims a different status for his legal formalism from that of Kant’s. In this paper I will address not only Reinach’s starting point, but also his claim to ground the Science of Law on objective legal formations, which can be intuited in the same way numbers or physical objects are intuited. (shrink)

This paper addresses the meaning and importance of Alexandre Morujão’s work for the reception of husserlian phenomenology in the Portuguese university. It gives also an overall view of his philosophical activity and interests, either as a university professor and researcher, or as a translator of philosophical works. The paper tracks also some of philosophical influences, sometimes hidden in the author’s published works, such as the influence of the Spanish philosopher Ortega y Gassett. Regarding phenomenology (and especially husserlian phenomenology), the paper (...) shows that Alexandre Morujão’s work tried to highlight the following three main themes: 1) the radical character of phenomenological attitude, as the science of origins and as a unitary theoretical connection of propositions grounded in ultimate evidences· 2) the ensuing radical awareness of the phenomenological Ego, not only as a pole of identity but above all as a set of habits, i.e. a series of synthesis passively persisting in his own personal life; 3) the relation of transcendental subjectivity to the life-world, as the world of intuition and immediate experience, and the ultimate ground of meaning. (shrink)

This paper is divided into three parts. The first part addresses the main tenets of Husserl ‘s conception of formal logic, its different levels and its relationship with formal mathematics and formal ontology. It will, therefore, undertake a delimitation of the logical domain, in its autonomy, taking as its point of departure the presentation Husserl makes of this subject in his works of maturity, particularly in Forma/e und. transzendentale Logik. The second ·part shows why, for phenomenology, the analysis of objective (...) logical configurations has to be completed by a subjective analysis of the intentional achievements in which these configurations have their genesis. ln other words, we will try to ground such an autonomy in. the very nature of logical reason. Finally, the third and last part, following the text of the first two sections of Erfahrung und Urteil, adresses the roots of the logical-categorical activity in the ante-predicative passive experience. (shrink)

The paper offers a survey of the debate between Husserl and Paul Natorp that followed the publication, by the former, of Logical Investigations, in 1900-1901. Beyond a general agreement on the nature of psychologism and the ways to struggle against it, Husserl and Natorp disagreed, at the time, on the nature and function of consciousness. As Natorp defended, since his Introduction to Psychology of 1888, that the objective contents of consciousness are distinct from the I as the subjective (and unobjectifiable) (...) point of reference of them all, Husserl remarks the inner contradiction of these argument; as long as philosophy pretends to speak of such an I it has to be treated as an object, albeit of a special kind. In the Logical Investigations, nevertheless, Husserl stresses that it is not even necessary to admit the existence of such an I to explain the acts of consciousness. However, and that is the central theme of the paper, the later evolution of Husserl’s thought and finally his «transcendental turn» can only be fully comprehensible from the admission of a strong influence of the previous criticized thesis of Natorp. (shrink)

Delfim Santos was not a phenomenologist, but his interest concerning phenomenological issues was more than an accident. Familiar with the philosophy of the Vienna Circle, but above all strongly influenced by Nicolai Hartmann, Delfim Santos sees in Husserl’s phenomenology (mainly in Ideas I) the recognition of several kinds or regions of objectivity, each with its peculiar regional essence. At the same time, he looks at the theory of intentionality as acknowledging the necessary relation between any realm of reality that requests (...) thinking activity, and reality itself recognize by thought regarding its ultimate layers of sense. But in this paper, we also show that while addressing existential issues, Delfim Santos came to the careful study Heidegger’s Being and Time; man appears to him as a being determined in his terrestrial life-course by transcendence and, consequently, as in the case of the German philosopher, as belonging to a zone of reality inaccessible to traditional ontological categories. At last, we trace the marks of Merleau-Ponty (as well as Gestalt-psychology) in Delfim Santos’ pedagogical works, particularly in the way he characterizes human action and its relations to physical-chemical stimuli that act not as a cause, but as a motive or occasion for meaningful behavior. (shrink)

O presente ensaio procura compreender a concepção husserliana da história a partir de conceitos tais como Urstiftung, Wiedererinnerung e Nachstiftung. Tentar-se-á, não só perceber as razões subjacentes à concepção teleológica da história, presente no livro da Crise (e nos textos que Ihe andam associados) e na Conferência de Viena de 1935, bem como o tipo de concepção do tempo histórico que é correlativa dela, mas também, sobretudo, detectar a possibilidade - a partir dos textos mesmos de Husserl - de uma (...) outra concepção, mais apta a exprimir a novidade e a contingência. (shrink)

In this paper, I discuss the guidelines of a phenomenology of the social world in the wake of Alfred Schutz and José Ortega y Gasset. While the latter was not, for a long time, acknowledge as a phenomenologist, the former is a well-known critique of Husserl’s theory of intersubjectivity and of the possibility of grounding a community of transcendental Egos. Both, however, remained faithful to some basic phenomenological tenets, namely, that individual subjectivity has a relational character, the circumstances in which (...) men live are a part of their life, and life is characterized by its openness to the world. On this basis, they both carried out a phenomenological description of social existence, stressing its two main assumptions: 1) there are things that must be taken for granted; 2) habitualities, typical constructions, and systems of relevance are the primary ways of dealing with social events and other fellow citizens. In different ways, they both showed that the traditional objections opposed to phenomenology regarding its capacity to address mundane human existence stemmed from a misunderstanding of its basic tenets and intentions. (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)

This paper adresses both the phenomenological theories of intentionality, reduction, and passive synthesis, and Freud’s theory of the inconscious. Its main purpose is to develop some ideas that will allow an answer to the two following questions. First: is there anything in Husserl’s phenomenology that authorizes the foundation, from a philosophical point of view, of the main psychoanalytical concepts, or at least opens the possibility of thinking them, regardless their specific therapeutically value? Secondly: is there anyting in psychoanalysis that excedes (...) everything that both a phenomenology of the acts of consciousness and the traditional philosophical discourse say about the psyche, inducing philosophy to review its most firmly established ideas about this matter? (shrink)

Shadows are intriguing phenomena. They do not have mass or energy. So, they are unable to have some basic characteristics of the objects of which they are shadows: they cannot move by themselves and they cannot experience the same kind of changes. At first sight, any theory of perception can skip this optical phenomenon or look at it only as a side-effect. Actually, in order to be seen objects must be illuminated and one of the consequences of this is that (...) they project a shadow over the surrounding space. Is that all? In this paper I will argue that, from a phenomenological point of view (or at least from a Husserlian oriented phenomenology), shadows, with their specific hyletic data, must be considered as an element of the process of constitution of spatial-temporal objectivities. In other words, shadows no less than other predicates, like extension or hardness, although in a different manner, belong to the a priori structure of those objectivities. This means that their ontological status is quite different from that of fictitious objects or hallucinations. To show this I will draw mainly in Husserl’s Lesson Thing and Space, from 1907, and other unpublished texts during Husserl’s lifetime, like the second volume of the Ideas and the Lesson of 1925 on Psychological Phenomenology. (shrink)

In this paper, I address Husserl’s theory of intentionality focusing on the problems of attention. I claim that without phenomenological reduction the specific phenomenological content of modalizations – in intentional acts – would be hard to explain. It would be impossible to understand why constant external factors (for instance, variations in the intensity of a stimulus) are accompanied by fluctuations in attention. It would also be impossible to understand the reasons why only the lived experience of causality – which I (...) sharply distinguish from causality in the psychophysical sense of the term – transforms attention into a factor that allows the understanding of a situation by the subject who lives that experience. I claim at last that only the genetic analysis of Husserl’s late Freiburg period, with its distinction between primary and secondary attention, gives a full account of the relation between the thematic object, focused on an intentional attentive act, and the horizon that surrounds the object and gives it its ultimate meaning. (shrink)

This paper focus on the phenomenological theories of perception and intuitive acts in general, and aims to show the relevance of William James’ concept of fringe to understand them. Although Husserl claims that James’ analysis were carried on without the phenomenological reduction and were thus biased by psychological and physiological prejudices, the paper stresses the high value of those analysis: James’ intended to remain faithful to the meaning of lived experience and avoided any considerations where descriptions could be entangled with (...) uncriticized philosophical theories (e.g. about the nature of brain states). The paper also aims to show that James’ importance for Husserl could be extended beyond the explanation of acts intending singular individuals to the acts intending universal objectivities and essences. (shrink)