Carlos Morujão

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 The publication in 2010 of a critical edition of his Complete Works opened worldwide access for many unpublished manuscripts, and some of his lectures.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.

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an analysis of these issues, resorting mainly to Schutz’s 1934 book Der Sinnhafte Aufbau der Sozialen Welt, and in some unpublished manuscripts.

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 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”, à la faveur d ’une pensée de l’autre.

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, mais déterminer la portée de la forme en tant que productrice d ’objectivité.

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 I propose an analysis of the phenomenon of knowledge based in the principles of intentional analysis endorsed by Edmund Husserl.