Carlos 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.

Alfred Schutz, before entering in contact with phenomenology, was a student of law with Hans Kelsen and of economics with Ludwig von Mises. What Schutz thought they both lacked was a clear-cut consciousness of the methodological procedures that would allow them to build their respective sciences, jurisprudence and economics. In the wake of Max Weber’s distinction between subjective and objective meaning, Schutz thought that both social scientists had been able to find out the domains of invariance of legal and of economic acts, i.e., acts that pertain to the domain of the two sciences. That is where he thought that the contribution of phenomenology was indispensable; first, to disclose how juridical and economical typical acts are grounded in pre-scientific typifications of the world of human interactions; secondly, to show that the social scientists must resort to processes of idealization, such as the ones described by Husserl (namely, in Formal and Transcendental Logic) to grasp the main concepts of their sciences.

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.

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.

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.

This chapter tries to grasp the relation between vital reason and historical reason. As has been said above, especially in chapter “Phenomenology Revisited”, Ortega establishes a close connection between reason and life: reason originates in life and endeavors both to understand its meaning and to illuminate its projects. But meaning is a historical category, depending on the fact that life is guided, either by the belief on a transcendent Being, or by public virtues in the domains of ethics and politics, or by faith in scientific progress, or by any other ideal. In important essays like En Torno a Galileo, for instance, Ortega tried to show the relation of reason to an overall worldview, which in the case of the Ancient World was structured around the belief on the reality of the Cosmos (even if it was a Cosmos inhabited by immortal gods) and in the case of Modernity is structured around a physical-mathematical project. The chapter also aims to address the important issue of the relation between history and truth. The philosophical kern of the problem (analyzed, for instance, in Ideas y Creencias and La Razón Histórica) lies in the following questions: Does truth change with historical epochs? Can the same basic truths be valid for the medieval man and the nineteenth century? We will try to show that Ortega’s answer may be found in his “perspectivism.” According to Ortega’s perspectivism (somewhat different from Nietzsche’s, regardless the influence of Nietzsche on Ortega), each epoch, perhaps even each generation, sees the world from one perspective, namely, the one that corresponds to its vital needs. Perspectivism is the outcome of the necessary selective function of a reason embedded in life and in its system of importancias (things that matter), a function that neither rationalism nor relativism were able to understand.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 (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.

This paper addresses, in the first place, the outcomes of the intentional analysis of the constitution of physical objects, the somatic body and the mind, as it was carried out by Edmund Husserl. On the basis of these outcomes, it will be possible to develop a phenomenological theory of affections that will allow, in the second place, some approaches to Freud’s Psychoanalysis and the Freudian theory of instincts. The specificity of the somatic body regarding any physical object – despite some similarities in their modes of giveness – is revealed, above all, in one’s experience of the somatic body and in one’s lived experience of affections. In particular, what Husserl calls the weakening or obscuring process of affections poses the question of the existence of a «phenomenological unconscious», whose relations with Freud’s unconscious, in a third and final moment of the paper, we will attempt to highlight.