Philosophica: International Journal for the History of Philosophy

O presente artigo pretende sobretudo oferecer uma retrospectiva sucinta e ao mesmo tempo abrangente da recepção, da presença, da interpretação e da divulgação do pensamento português nos primeiros cinquenta números da revista Philosophica, fundada em 1993 e editada pelo Departamento e pelo Centro de Filosofia da Universidade de Lisboa. A organização do artigo visa destacar a contribuição do periódico para a actividade e o estudo de pensadores portugueses e para o aprofundamento de questões e temas que se diriam típicos da reflexão filosófica lusa e lusófona. Entre as coordenadas dentro das quais o trabalho se desenvolve eis, por um lado, a história e as especificidades programáticas da revista, e por outro, o debate sobre o haver Filosofia em Portugal vs. haver uma Filosofia Portuguesa, com a vibrante e desassossegante carga crítica que esta questão traz consigo.

In this paper we will revisit the theme of Philosophy teaching in its fundamental debate about what it is and its possibility. It is not intended here to inventory everything that has already been thought about this question, nor would it be possible, but rather to think of it in dialogue with what some authors (but could be others) thought and wrote. Philosophy does not disassociate itself from the act. It is done and it is possible to teach to do it because deep down it is a process that is learned in the measure that is cultivated, that is cultivated in the measure in which one lives and practices. This is the meaning given to the reflection proposed here.

The following essay presents an analysis on Kantian aesthetics, more specifically directed to the concept of the sublime. We begin with a broad approach to the nature of Kantian aesthetics – in relation to aesthetic-reflexive judgements. Only after this brief context we move on to define the sublime following Immanuel Kant’s approach, doing so in contrast with the concept of beauty – the same way Kant clarified. Sublimity incurs from an inability of human imagination and understanding to comprehend certain phenomena, whose magnitude is beyond us and petrifies us; there is, however some moral potential in this sentiment. In conclusion, we propose a more contemporary reflection on the sublime.

This paper evokes the life and the work of Vasco de Magalhães-Vilhena as a communist militant and a Marxist philosopher. These two dimensions are inseparable in his life’s exemplariness as much as in the intensive intellectual activity through which he influenced the philosophical culture of his lifetime as much as in the writings he left to the further generations. The PCP, having donated the Magalhães-Vilhena Library to the School of Arts and Humanities (Faculdade de Letras) of the University of Lisbon, recognizes the value of this homage in the school where the foregoing professor lectured and fi nished his teaching practice.

We analyze the criticism of Vasco de Magalhães-Vilhena to the idealist conception of the history of philosophy, exercised from his own conception of philosophy as a form of social consciousness and ideology, submitted to the processual dynamics of time and history. In this sense, it is important to underline the way in which the conception of history is rejected as a discipline that deals with the contingent and the accidental, in opposition to which the ideal of a perennial philosophy would rise and the consequent valorization of immutability, removing what is historical of the essence of the philosophical.

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.

In his seminal work of 1939 about the idea of progress, published and awarded in the University of Coimbra intellectual milieu, the young Vasco Magalhães-Vilhena wrote what is probably the first major philosophical essay in the Portuguese language, deeply connected with a Marxist world vision. The essay is a well-established academic master-piece, where the philosophical esotericism, underlined by Leo Strauss, is intensively at work, disguising, with some areas of deliberately ambiguity, almost completely the traces of Marx and his larger constellation involving authors like Engels and Feuerbach. What is entirely visible to the attentive reader is the subtle mind of the writer, and his capacity to address important topics of social and political philosophy, like those linked to the dialectical understanding of contemporary capitalism and its intrinsic contradictions, both as an economic model and a civilization paradigm.