Carlos Ventura Morujão

This paper examines Portuguese philosopher Delfim Santos's response to Ortega’s 1946 Lisbon lecture, "Idea of ​​the Theater." The analysis demonstrates that Delfim Santos misinterpreted Ortega’s objectives, overlooking the fact that Ortega was employing the phenomenological method. Without reference to key concepts originating from Husserl’s Ideas I – such as neutralization, irreality, and fantasy – the meaning of the 1946 lecture becomes difficult to grasp. Additionally, the paper shows that Ortega does not merely adopt Husserl’s conceptual framework; rather, he applies the phenomenological method in a creative manner, consistent with his 1929 Lectures. Proceeding from the premise that what is manifest often conceals more intimate elements, Ortega advances from external features to more intrinsic aspects. He begins by exploring the significance of the theater’s architecture and the distinction between audience and stage, subsequently addressing the central issue: the irrealization of life, or the epoché of the effective world, which occurs within theatrical performance.

Em sua explicação da ação humana, Alfred Schutz recorre principalmente à noção de significado subjetivo de Max Weber e à noção de tipo de Husserl. Para ele, o significado subjetivo parece mais importante para entender a ação humana do que o fato de os atores sociais internalizarem valores normativos. Assim, a validade tem a ver principalmente com projetos de ação, com expectativas cumpridas (ou não cumpridas) e com o estoque de conhecimento disponível, juntamente com o sistema de relevâncias do ator. Isso levanta dois problemas schoutzianos característicos: 1) a relação entre o significado subjetivo de uma ação e os critérios objetivos (a saber, os jurídicos e os éticos) segundo os quais qualquer ação pode ser avaliada; 2) a relação entre um ator e seus semelhantes seres humanos que sem dúvida compartilham o mesmo sistema de relevâncias e agem na mesma estrutura normativa. Neste artigo, pretendo oferecer uma análise dessas questões, recorrendo principalmente ao livro de Schutz, de 1934, _Der Sinnhafte Aufbau der Sozialen Welt_, e em alguns manuscritos inéditos.

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.

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.

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?

This chapter will also try to expound the aims of Ortega’s three travels to Germany, where he studied Kant was trained in and Neokantian philosophy, and, at the end of the third journey, discovered the new philosophical “continent” represented by Husserlian phenomenology. As a young Neokantian, Ortega reinforced his conviction that European science and philosophy were the solutions for the evils affecting Spanish culture: as a backward nation, Spain had not yet attained the level of the universality of higher culture. However, the apparent difficulties of Neokantian-inspired thinkers to understand Spanish art caused in Ortega a change of mind. (His essays on the paintings of Ignacio Zuloaga will be analyzed in these contexts.) The chapter will end with a short approach to the “Prologue to Germans,” from 1934, where Ortega makes a mature appraisal of his indebtedness to German culture.

This chapter addresses Spain’s philosophical and culture milieu at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries. Particular attention will be given to the Krausist movement and its impact in politics and culture. The failure of Spanish Krausism and of the regime of “Regeneración,” largely inspired by its most prominent representatives, will give rise to the Generation of ‘98 and of a cultural movement intending to raise Spain from its social and political backwardness. Here begins a discussion about the relation of Spain to Europe and European philosophy and science. Particularly important is the debate between Ortega and Unamuno about this issue. The chapter will evaluate the position of Ortega and Unamuno, attested by an almost uninterrupted mail correspondence until 1912. The young Ortega, a proponent of “Europeanization,” will react to Unamuno’s position, who questions the benefits of becoming “European,” although finally acknowledging some of the reasons beyond Unamuno’s doubts.

This paper aims to analyze some theses of Vasco de Magalhães-Vilhena regarding the problem of knowledge, namely, the so-called theory of the “reflex”. The point of departure is the critic the author addresses to António Sérgio, whose philosophical position is correctly characterized as Neo-kantian Idealism. Magalhães-Vilhena aims to link the doctrine of the reflex, inspired by the research of the Russian physiologist I. Pavlov, to the concept of reflection proposed by Hegel in the Second Part of the Science of Logic. In this paper I question the legitimacy of this connection. At last, confronting the standpoint of Magalhães-Vilhena regarding gnosiological issues (whose corollary is the dependence of sense-data from physical stimuli) I propose an analysis of the phenomenon of knowledge based in the principles of intentional analysis endorsed by Edmund Husserl.

This chapter begins with an analysis of Ortega’s topology of human soul, which is divided in three levels: the vital, the animated, and the spiritual. We will show that Ortega aims to show the insufficiency of the traditional distinction between the mind and body and to stress the fact that human beings are embodied spirits. Next, we will address two important dimensions of human life: the virtual reality and the need for security. They are a sound basis for establishing a distinction between human and animal ways of being. The chapter will highlight the deep relation between these three concepts and the Orteguian concept of circumstance and the tasks that a “circumstantial” life entails, i.e., the imperative of fidelity to one’s own vocation. We will show that for Ortega, man turns to himself because he needs to stop to think, since life is a permanent “having things to do,” on the basis of a radical insecurity that affects man’s being in the world and the contact with his fellow human beings. This turning to himself is what makes him the animal rationale. This is the reason why the task of “having to do” is not only inescapable but also untransferable.

This paper aims to explain the concepts of somatization and embodiment, clarifying their meaning and establishing points of contact and differentiation between them. To this end, a review of the concepts was carried out both in the psychological and the philosophical literature. We claim that a psychological account of somatization of psychical processes (whether of a pathological nature or not) must take into account the basic anthropological feature of human beings that consists in the fact that they are psycho-physical units. Philosophical literature on the subject can be of some help to psychologists (we also claim), since it enlightens the fact that there is no lived experience of the world and of others, at least in the so-called normal cases, where the abovementioned unity is not immediately present.

This first part of this chapter is mainly devoted to an analysis of The Revolt of the Masses and to Ortega’s distinction between minorities and masses. (The origin of this distinction can be traced in philosophers such as Nietzsche who had a lasting influence on Ortega but also in his own reflections about Spain and the ways of rescuing it.) We will show that the philosophical method consisting in a search for the “latent” dimensions of reality beneath its patent levels—proposed for the first time in the Meditations on Quixote—is applied here to social reality. The psychological and sociological type Ortega names “the mass-man” underlies European and American life and explains their most visible aspects: the contempt for the past, the mentality of the heir who does not have to take care of his heritage, the technical specialization without worries of cultural and ethical nature. We will then turn to Ortega’s social ontology in Man and People, showing its deep relations with Alfred Schütz’s social ontology. Both authors aim to give a philosophical foundation of Max Weber’s comprehensive sociology and ground social ontology on life as a radical reality. On the other hand, the two authors address several criticisms to the Husserlian theory of intersubjectivity, exposed in the fifth Cartesian Meditation. They both doubt of the possibility of the transcendental grounding program that Husserl intended to achieve, proposing instead a phenomenological description of the social world as lived in the natural attitude. We will also show that, for both, the experience of the “social” is the experience of a level of “invisibility,” i.e., the norms, procedures, and laws that manifest themselves in the effective reality of a community.

Da ns cet article, en jou ant, en un certain sens, Kant contre Heidegger, on a essayé de penser les droits d e l’homme a partir de l’instance qui les fonde, celle du rapport. On a montré de quelle façon l’émergence de la société civile, avec les temps modernes, rend caduc tout essai (comme ceux qu’on a connu sous le romantisme) de récupérer le modèle grec de la polis, en tant que modèle de la pure sociabilité. Pour finir, on remarque que la seule voie d’accès à cette question qui soit à la hauteur des problèmes posés par notre temps, nous contraint à abandonner toute pensée du “propre” ou de la “propriété” (qui est encore celle de Heidegger), à la faveur d ’une pensée de l’autre.

On se propose de montrer comment Rousseau analyse la situation de l’Europe de son temps et envisage la possibilité d’une régénération des États européens, finissant par mettre en doute la valeur thérapeutique du remède qu'il avait lui-même prescrit. On part de la théorie de l’état de nature et du passage de celui-ci à l'état social, dans lequel pourrait se trouver une explication du malheur présent. Finalement, on montre comment le mythe de l’état de nature, pourvu, avant tout, d'une valeur herméneutique, se trouve à la racine du pessimisme de Rousseau, en ce qui concerne le destin d’une Europe qui devient incapable de s’égaler à la grandeur du mythe.

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.

In 1929 things changed for Ortega regarding his relation to phenomenology: the ultimate evidence of “my life” cannot be attained by the phenomenological method. In fact, according to Ortega, the method is based on reflection, i.e., an activity intended to grasp the primordial executive activity of consciousness (or, as Ortega likes to say, of “human individual life”), and not on that activity itself. The chapter evaluates this criticism, how far he misinterpreted Husserl’s notion of reflection and its aim in Ideas I, and shows its permanence in Ortega’s own evaluation of his relations both with Neokantianism and phenomenology in the late 1940s, namely, in the unfinished book The Idea of Principle in Leibniz.

Ortega was exiled for 10 years, after leaving Madrid in the first months of the Spanish Civil War. Besides the immediate reason of his escape from Spain—the fear of being arrested by the Republican Government—Ortega’s exile may be linked to his overall view of the failure of a liberal program for Spain, i.e., a program that would respect the autonomy of the individual regarding state power. While the French exile was unimportant from a philosophical point of view—due to its brevity and the poor health conditions of Ortega at the time—the Argentinian and Portuguese exiles were much more fruitful. Important Lectures in Buenos Aires and Lisbon were made about the concept of historical reason. The first drafts of the future (and only posthumously published) book El Hombre y la Gente were written during this epoch. One of the most important of Ortega’s writings, also posthumously published, La Idea de Principio en Leibniz, was began in his Lisbon exile. The chapter will end with an examination of Ortega’s conference on the theater, held in Lisbon in 1946, some months before his return to Spain. We will show that Ortega addressed the theme of this conference as a means to extend the phenomenological method beyond its original domains.

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.

This chapter evaluates Ortega’s philosophy at the beginning of the 1930s, after his 1929 masterpiece What is Philosophy? We will focus on the three editions of the Course Lessons on Metaphysicsaccording to Vital Reason, in 1932–1933, 1934–1935, and 1935–1936. We will also mention the originally unpublished “Prologue to Germans” from 1934 and make some glimpses to the unfinished The Idea of Principle in Leibniz, which Ortega began to write in his Lisbon residence. If, on the one hand, idealism (especially of the Neokantian kind) was always the target of Ortega’s criticisms since 1912, phenomenology seemed, at least until 1929, to offer him a good alternative as a realistic-oriented doctrine of essences. Against the constructivism of the Neokantians, making reality dependent on the subjective activity of the transcendental Ego, phenomenology was backed by intuition and the search for ultimate evidences.

Throughout his life Ortega y Gasset turned his attention to the definition and critical analysis of art and aesthetics, converting this theorization into a vital constituent of his philosophical system. In his own peculiar style, the Spanish thinker tried to understand the political, historical, and social disruptions of his time and their reflection in culture, aesthetics, and art in the early twentieth century. This chapter stresses the place of aesthetics in Ortega’s philosophical system and the role of metaphor as a source of existence and knowledge. We will focus on Ortega’s philosophical evolution and mainly on his theorization of art according to the two aesthetics or paradigms that had been prefigured from his first article “Adam in Paradise” (1910) to “Velázquez” (1959), stressing The Dehumanization of Art (1925) as a turning point in Ortega’s perspective toward the nature and purpose of art. In this masterpiece, Ortega recognized in avant-garde movements a new sensibility, concluding that what was lost in transcendence was gained in innovation. Albeit this new art form has no defined rules, it should be respected and supported, since it represents the artist’s subjectivity and perspectivism. Ortega’s sharp analysis raises new readings and interpretations that we aim to reevaluate in favor of a more syncretic reassessment.

Ortega’s philosophical life was not a very happy one. His endeavors to give his philosophy a systematic form and to display it systematically before the public were not successful. Moreover, his remarkable literary gifts often led people to think he was more a talented disseminator of philosophical, aesthetic, and scientific ideas than an original philosopher. In The Idea of Principle in Leibniz Ortega says sourly that none of his contemporaries tried to grasp the following single fact: his writings were not literature that looked like philosophy, but instead a systematic philosophy that offered itself under the guise of a literary text (Ortega y Gasset, 2009b: 1136). Of course, there are two distinct issues here. The first has to do with the essence of philosophy itself, the other with the method of its exposition.

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.

Dans cet article nous nous sommes proposé de montrer l’ampleur de la transformation operée par Husserl sur la notion d’analytico-formel, par rapport au sens que ces deux termes possédait chez Kant. Nous avons montré que c’était lá le but des investigations, que Husserl lui-même appelait d’ordre psychologique, sur les fondements de l’arithmétique, aussi bien que de sa critique du psichologisme, ammorcée dès le 1.er tome des Recherches Logiques. Nous avons aussi montré que le but de Husserl n’était pas d’établir un ensemble de propriétés formelles des objects (en soi-mêmes vides de tout contenu), mais déterminer la portée de la forme (à l’instar des géométries non-euclidiènnes) en tant que productrice d ’objectivité.