Carlos Ventura Morujão

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.

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.

Phenomenology played a significant role in Derrida’s training as a young philosopher. His essay on Husserl’s phenomenological genetic approach, that was published only more than 30 years after it was written, gives us clear proof of this assertion. For the young Derrida, however, there was an inner (and unsolved) dialectic in Husserl’s thought: first, between logicism and psychologism, later, between static and genetic analysis. In his more mature years, Derrida detected the impossibility for Husserl to overcome that dialectic – and offer a satisfactory account of the giveness of logical objectities to a transcendental Ego, and of their grounding in lifeworld experiences – in Husserl’s uncritical belonging to the metaphysics of presence. In this paper, I try to highlight the meaning of this expression and its utility for understanding Husserl’s achievements. I will endorse the thesis that Husserl’s theory of intentionality, static or genetic, cannot be understood in terms of a variety of “foundationalism”, even if of a special kind, as Derrida wants us to believe with his critical analysis especially of Husserl’s late production. This is the ultimate reason why I will question the legitimacy of opposing, like Derrida does, “trace”, on the one hand, and intuitive giveness, on the other, in order to deconstruct Husserl’s alleged uncritical acceptance of the metaphysics of presence.

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.

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.

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.