This book is a critical introduction for English-speaking philosophers to the main lines of thought of José Gaos, an outstanding twentieth-century philosopher who was active first in Spain and then in Mexico. The study traces philosophical methods and cultural themes in Spain, the European continent in general, and Latin America. The author skillfully applies phenomenology to the deep questions raised by Gaos concerning being, time, language, and meaning. Peter Cocozzella has painstakingly translated this ground-breaking study from Italian. Myra Moss and Giovanni Gullace have added useful introductory material. A comprehensive bibliography is included. Values in Italian Philosophy (VIP) offers the English-speaking world outstanding works by classic and contemporary Italian thinkers as well as books on Italian philosophy.

This book introduces the profound reflections of Xavier Zubiri (1898-1983) on the history of philosophy to English-speaking audiences. As a philosopher who rethought much of philosophy and theology, Zubiri felt it necessary to be in continuous dialogue with earlier thinkers both to avoid past mistakes and to extract all that is valuable from them. The theme of the present book is the transcendental in Western philosophy and how a firm grasp of it reveals underlying unity in Western philosophy, but also fundamental problems that Zubiri believed require a complete rethinking of certain basic notions and theories. Zubiri develops this theme by analyzing the work of six major philosophers: Aristotle, St. Thomas, Descartes, Leibniz, Kant, and Hegel. To conclude, he sketches his own resolution of the problems of Western philosophy, a subject addressed in greater depth in his major work, Sentient Intelligence. This translation was made possible by a grant from the Spanish Ministry of Culture.

Alphonse-Joseph-Auguste Gratry (1805-1872) was born in Lille, northern France, of irreligious parents and lived during a time of endless revolution. As a young man, he underwent a powerful conversion in which he experienced a mystical vision of a world based on truth and justice. This determined the course of his future life. A classically educated scholar, he studied engineering at the outstanding ?cole Polytechnique, completed a doctorate on the scientific method in Strasbourg (1840), was ordained a priest, and later obtained a doctorate in letters and a licentiate in theology. Moved by the events of 1848, he published his first book in the form of a social catechism on the necessity for a systematic response to the needs of society. In a parallel initiative to that of Blessed John Henry Cardinal Newman in England, he relaunched the Congregation of the Oratory in Paris (1852) with Pierre Petetot to raise intellectual standards among the clergy after the Revolution. A charismatic individual, well known as a distinguished logician, theologian, social thinker, and outstanding educator, preacher, and spiritual director, his major philosophical works appeared in the 1850s. The French Academy recognized his genius with election to the chair held by Voltaire a century earlier. Gratry fell into disfavor for his adhesion to the International Peace League on the eve of France's war with Germany, and for his stand in regard to papal infallibility before Vatican I (a position largely vindicated in Vatican II), but he accepted the much narrower declaration once it was made. His most famous work, Les Sources, widely published until World War II, offers a plan of studies and a plan of life which reflect Gratry's philosophy of the person. The Christian Democratic Parties, the French lay movement Le Sillon, the Young Christian Workers (YCW), and the writings of Peter Maurin, mentor to today's Catholic Worker movement, witness to his foundational and comprehensive influence. For the first time in English, we have Julian Marias's (1914-2005) clear and accessible study (5th ed.) on the core of Alphonse Gratry's philosophy. Although he lived more than a century ago (1805-1872), Gratry addresses issues of concern today: the ontology of the human person with its body/soul unity; the intrinsic relationship of individuals to society and nature; and the problem of God. Recognized as a master in his lifetime with the rapid reprinting of his Logic, The Knowledge of God, and The Knowledge of the Soul, Gratry was relegated to near oblivion less than seventy years later with the rejection of metaphysics and the rise of Positivism. Marias reclaims Gratry's place in the history of philosophy and thoroughly explains Gratry's original logic "written from the point of view of the juncture of philosophy and the human spirit." He shows how Gratry's theory of induction, in Plato's original and foundational sense (Rep. VI), forms the heart of his metaphysics of knowledge-the science of transcendence by which the mind intellectually apprehends all reality: corporeal, psychic, and divine. Gratry thus establishes a complete ontology of the human person-rational, free, and endowed with a three-fold sense: external, intimate (sens intime), and divine-dependent on unlimited being or God. Gratry's original logic and metaphysics stands on its own philosophical basis, but in Chapter 6, "Five Interior Adventures," Marias includes a parallel, existential foundation drawn from Gratry's private journal. This reveals how the young atheist underwent a series of near mystical experiences which gave him an inescapable awareness of God and confronted him with the moral choice for or against this reality. In this extraordinarily lucid study, we now have access to the complete thought of Gratry, giving scholar and student, as Marias observes, a seemingly providential body of work needed in our time.

This book examines the present-day distribution and diachronic evolution of a set of infinitival structures in Spanish, Portuguese and Romanian, making use of extensive corpus data and investigating how pragmatic factors and usage patterns interact with syntax. After a contrastive account of the patterns of clausal subordination in Latin and Romance, the rise of prepositional infinitives is traced through the documented history of the three languages, revealing astonishing parallels in their development. The analysis of the data shows how cognitive principles such as reanalysis and entrenchment combine with parameters such as relevance and usage frequency to cause syntactic change. Beyond providing a genuine explanation for the observed processes in the Romance languages, this study offers new evidence for the existence of language-independent, cross-linguistically applicable principles and mechanisms in language change.

The approach to the theme of the body within the framework of phenomenology is developed in 20th century France. Despite the evident Cartesianism, it is there that the principles of a phenomenology of the body are configured, in the confluence between the phenomenological tradition and the philosophy of existence. The systematic development of the phenomenology of the body, which takes centered reflection on the corporeal existence and the incarnated subject, corresponds, among others, to Gabriel Marcel, Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Bernhard Waldenfels. The phenomenology of the body opens a new horizon to understand the corporeal dimension of human existence and offers a new philosophical view of the body, while the body is not only an observable reality as an object, but it is a dimension of the being itself, as, according to Merleau-Ponty, from the phenomenology of “corporeal existence”, the body is the “medium” of our “being-in-the-world”. That is precisely why it can be radically said that “being-in-the-world” (Heidegger) is primarily a “corporal-being-in-the-world" (Waldenfels). This implies “belonging to the world”, being “implicated” in the world through the body and, also, that the body opens a subject to the world. The phenomenology of the body sought to restore the unity of human existence. Husserl, Scheler, Marcel, Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, Waldenfels, among others, break with the modern mechanistic conception of the body and resignify subjectivity and objectivity, in open opposition to the dualistic tradition. The phenomenology of corporeal existence makes the body our way-to-be-in-the-world. The body not only ceases to be an object, but also a passive structure, receiving a reality configured by the confines of res cogitans. Based on Husserl, a theory of the phenomenological body is developed, which will reverse the subordinate role that the body had in Cartesian thought. Merleau-Ponty, who t

Thorough and lucid survey of Western philosophy from pre-Socratics to mid 20th century — major figures, currents, trends. Valuable section on contemporary philosophy — Brentano, Ortega, Heidegger, others. "Brevity and clarity of exposition..." — Ethics.