Xavier Zubiri Research Articles

The Real and the Human Imbricated… Žižek and Zubiri vs. Miller

This article reflects on how the issue of the Real allows us to rethink the human of today in a more complete and up-to-date way. And for this purpose, two apparently dissimilar perspectives of understanding the Real are discussed: that of the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek, which is rooted in Lacan’s psychoanalysis, and that of the Spanish philosopher Xavier Zubiri, which is born from a deep critical dialogue with Heidegger’s ontology. This paper will show the unity of two visions of the Real that lie at the heart of what is human and that allow us to criticize certain very influential psychoanalytic thought, centred on Jacques-Alain Miller, which cannot account for what is happening to us radically in the current era, or, perhaps, in any era.

Systems of Reference for Personality Structure: Peseschkian & Zubiri on Systems of Reference

The Spanish philosopher, Xavier Zubiri, wrote a major work titled Sentient Intelligence wherein he analyzes the human act of intellective knowing. In this work he delineates the importance of a system of reference (SoR) which serves two important functions: providing a direction for intellectual inquiry and providing an experience. The Iranian born psychiatrist, Nossrat Peseschkian, creator of Positive Psychotherapy, which originated in Germany in 1968, also mentions the importance of systems of reference (SsoR) for psychological knowing and personality structure. In this article, I expound upon and develop this construct, showing how humans have many SsoR which we use in interpreting psychological experience which form our unique personalities, based upon what we learn in our environments-of-origin. These SsoR become foundations for individual personality characteristics and provide insights into personality structure. I apply Zubiri’s construct to Peseschkian’s psychological system of reference, drawing out elements of Peseschkian’s contribution to personality theory. SsoR which we learn as infants can be modified and differentiated to create healthier ones and knowing them are important for psychological understanding. Furthermore, all approaches to psychotherapy and theories of personality can benefit from knowing of these SsoR.

The Human “Historicity” as a Permanent Transition in the Philosophy of Ignacio Ellacuría

Ignacio Ellacuría was brutally murdered in November the 16th, 1989 by the hands of El Salvador’s Armed Forces; ten years later in 1999, a quick but detailed “schema” of Xavier Zubiri’s anthropology, which he had used for a course he taught between July and August 1968 at the Centro de Estudios Superiores para el Desarrollo (CESDE) in Medellín, was published within the second volume which collected the Jesuit’s philosophical writings. The “schema” brings together many of those theses that form the basis of his most important work, and which came out posthumously, “Filosofía de la realidad histórica” (1990); this was developed in close comparison with the thought of the great Spanish philosopher whose Ellacuría was student and collaborator. The historiographical reconstruction of the salient passages of Ellacuría’s research on the relationship between historicity and history in the broader Zubiri anthropological context makes possible to highlight some peculiar aspects of the Jesuit’s thought, which is not merely limited to offer a new and different line of interpretation of Zubiri’s thought. The prominence of the idea of history as a transition within the social body, characteristic of the human experience, offers a new perspective, all internal to the Ibero-American philosophy of liberation, and at the same time, allows us to trace new and different sources in Ellacuría’s philosophical production.

De lo invisible y de lo inasible

Since ancient Greece, the sense of sight has been emphasized above all other senses. Today, in the face of certain events - invisible and intangible- such as radioactivity or viruses, the sense of sight has lost all its relevance. Other senses are beginning to gain importance and volume. The sense of touch, enters the scene directly before the invisible and the intangible, defoliating inexorably, in many cases, illness and death. Today it is forced, given our particular reality, to educate the new generations about the importance of the sense of touch. This is the subject of this article based on the philosophy of Xavier Zubiri.

The Quest for the Dynamic Structure of Reality: Xavier Zubiri, Phenomenology, and Quantum Mechanics

The Quest for the Dynamic Structure of Reality: Xavier Zubiri, Phenomenology, and Quantum Mechanics

Razón y experiencia: contribuciones para una ampliación de la diversidad epistemológica

The philosophical transformation carried out Xavier Zubiri, especially in his mature work: Sentient intelligence allows to rethink the bases of rationality in structural unity with the senses, allowing a plurality of ways of accessing reality on its foundation (experience), and surpass, in that way, the monological rationality promoted by positivism and pragmatism. To this end, we move through the different landmarks of Zubiri’s work: first, the primordial apprehension of reality from its multiple sentient openings; then, we stop at the constitution of meaning by logos emphasizing how culture prioritize one type of sense (view, hear, touch, etc.) over the rest, forging a type of openness to reality and determining a horizon of meaning for it; later, we inquire into how reason accesses the foundation of the real, this allows us to show how the different rationalities settle their options for meaning. From here we contrast with religious rationality founded on historical-scientific criterion, and a strictly religious one, which, ultimately, allow us to finish systematizing and giving a unity of meaning to the previews proposals that were made. Finally, all this enables us to explore the consequences for a sociology of knowledge (Epistemologies of the South), and to think about the conditions of intercultural dialogue, and, subsequently, the scenarios of and interlogical construction.

El texto de El ser sobrenatural como contexto próximo para entender la noología, la metafísica y la visión de Dios sobre Zubiri

The philosophy of Xavier Zubiri is recognized as one of the most diffi cult to understand because there is something unclear in it. Therefore one may guess that there is a hidden presumption done by Zubiri. Zubiri in the self-presentation of his philosophical backgrounds acknowledges that his philosophy owes most to the phenomenology of Husserl and metaphysics of Heidegger. He also admits of being infl uenced by Aristotle to a certain degree. Zubiri starts his analyses from perception of things, with which he fulfi lls phenomenological requirement of beginning philosophy with the description of reality. As the fi nal step he ads metaphysics, which explains the description of reality. Following this code of interpretation of Zubiri’s philosophy it is difficult to grasp its core meaning. What is this hidden supposition? In The Supernatural Being: God and Deifi cation in Saint Paul’s Theology, which he wrote in the 30s’ and 40s’ of the 20th century, Zubiri presents early Christian Neoplatonic theology. In the same work Zubiri also states that it is possible to discover the same ideas following the way up, i.e. departing from the creatures and ascending to God. And this will be the hidden supposition of his philosophy. This paper tries to show the philosophy of Zubiri can be understood as a kind of proof that the Neoplatonic vision of the reality presented in The Supernatural Being: God and Deifi cation in Saint Paul’s Theology is true and can be discovered by reason alone, i.e. departing only from description of facts.

A walk through the history of Spanish thought influenced by Uexküll

Abstract Jakob Johannes von Uexküll’s biological thought influenced a new path to approach the view of a living being throughout of the twentieth century. At the beginning of the past century, in Spain a “new vertebrate way of thinking” was generated, as Ortega would say. And the work of Uexküll initiated an interest in the circles of thinkers of the likes of Julio Caro Baroja, José Ortega y Gasset, and Xavier Zubiri among others. My aim is describing how Uexküll plays a part in the development in the foundations of thoughts of these thinkers; in particular, Ortega and Zubiri’s thought and their interactions between the circumstantiality and formality, respectively, and Uexküll’s Umwelt. In fact, Ortega’s biological thought was the foundation of his vitalism realism and made a giant step in philosophical anthropology existentialism in his Meditations of Quixote in 1911. We will also see the anthropologist Caro Baroja’s epistemic Uexküll influences. A retrospective view of Spanish thought will be developed, where the seeds of Uexküll made fruitful the development of several authors, as well as some transitive or indirect influences; even the generation of discrepancies in others. Finally, we will describe the development, in Spanish, that had the work of Thure von Uexküll, which includes the work of his father. With Thure, the Uexküll influences in Spain concluded until the start of interest in zoosemiotics and biosemiotics.

Ignacio Ellacuría, filósofo mártir de la realidad histórica, discípulo de Xavier Zubiri

Father Ignacio Ellacuría (1930-1989) was a Spanish Jesuit philosopher and the most important disciple of another great Spanish philosopher, Xavier Zubiri (1898-1983). Ellacuría was sent to El Salvador (Central America) in 1949 at eighteen, and after degrees in humanities, philosophy, and theology in Ecuador and Austria (where he was disciple of Karl Rahner), he travelled to Spain in 1962 for doctoral studies with Zubiri. There he became perhaps the leading specialist on Zubiri’s philosophy, which first analyzes reality as a dynamically structured epigenetic system tracing its emergence from material through organic to historical reality (open to transcendence), and second, which postulates the concept of sentient intelligence through which we are able to apprehend reality as reality. Upon returning to El Salvador in 1967, Ellacuría used Zubiri’s philosophical system to develop a powerful analysis of Latin America’s complicated historical reality during the 1960’s, 70’s, and 80’s. Ellacuría’s extraordinary output touched many different fields: philosophy, theology, political analysis, and his role as President of the UCA (Universidad Centroamericana José Simeón Cañas) in defense of the poor, and as peacemaker during the Civil War in El Salvador (1980-1991). He was assassinated with five other Jesuits and two women housekeepers by Salvadoran soldiers on November 16th 1989.

Метафизика Хавьера Субири: вечный поиск между Богом и человеком

The article is a foreword to the translation of the chapter of the book The Struc­ture of Metaphysics of the Spanish thinker Xavier Zubiri, which was published in 2016. The foreword gives a brief excursion into the publication of this book, which includes both lectures on the structure of metaphysics in 1969 and the philosopher’s manuscript with the same name written a decade later. The struc­ture of metaphysics is fundamentally important for understanding the evolution of Zubiri’s ideas, and it will also be useful to everyone is interested in the history of Western metaphysics, which Zubiri skillfully expounds here from Aristotle to Hegel with an emphasis on the concept of the transcendental. The foreword also gives a short explication of the key concepts of Xavier Zubiri’s philosophy such as: reality, intelligence, essence, time and other concepts, which are necessary to understand the personal position of the philosopher.

La ética en el horizonte post-metafísico. Poder y deber como hechos morales

The subject of ethics has already been studied by scholars who have focused on the work of the philosopher Xavier Zubiri. Nevertheless, within the framework of what we might call ‘Zubiri’s ethics’ (Aranguren, Ellacuria, D. Gracia, etc.), not all the presuppositions of a postmetaphysical Zubirian ethics have yet been analyzed. By Zubirian ‘post-metaphysical ethics’ we understand that which derives from noology or the theory of sentient intelligence. As this theory affects both the affecting feeling and the tending will according to what Zubiri called ‘intellectionism’, the aim of the present work is the study of ethics from the perspective of the third vector, the tending will, following what Zubiri called ‘possessional intelligence’. The result is that the description of the moral fact allows us to approach the concepts of ‘power’ and ‘duty’ from new viewpoints, highly fruitful in present-day ethics.

Rationality or reasonableness: an attempt at changing the paradigm of philosophical cognition of God – thought of Xavier Zubiri

The majority of the philosophical proves of the existence of God or other philosophical attempts of talking about Him try to meet standards of rationality only. In this way they reach mostly a philosophical notion of God which rules out a religious relationship to Him. Zubiri is trying to present a philosophical way which leads to a notion of God, who can be at the same time a God of philosophy and of religion. But this means overcoming rationality with reasonableness. Reasonable means compatible with human life.

La mecánica ondulatoria llega a España: Schrödinger en la Universidad Internacional de Santander, agosto de 1934

We describe and analyze the details of the first visit of the Viennese physicist Erwin Schröding-er to Spain, in the summer of 1934. The reason for the trip was the invitation he received from the International University of Santander, a meeting he attended after participating in the XIV Conference of the Spanish Association for the Advancement of Science that took place that same summer in Santiago de Compostela. We will discuss the impact of this visit on the first developments of quantum mechanics in Spain and see the role that personalities such as Xavier Zubiri or Blas Cabrera played in this episode. We will also put this visit in the context of Schrödinger’s personal and academic life, especially as regards the content of his talks. We will see that what he presented in Santiago and Santander should be considered as an advan-ce of his criticism of the orthodox interpretation of quantum mechanics. We leave for a second installment the trip he made in the spring of 1935, less than a year later, this time with his wife Annie, and in which he delivered various conferences and courses on wave mechanics in Madrid.

Becoming and Individuation on the Encounter between Technical Apparatus and Natural System

Becoming and Individuation on the Encounter between Technical Apparatus and Natural System

Towards a Philosophy of Chemical Reactivity Through the Molecule in Atoms-of Concept

A novel non-classical mereological concept (Molecule in Atoms-of) built up by blending the Metaphysics of Xavier Zubiri and the Quantum Theory of Atoms in Molecules (QTAIM) of R. F. W. Bader is proposed. It is argued that this philosophical concept is necessary to properly account for what happens in a chemical reaction. From the topology of the gradient of the laplacian of the electronic charge density, $$\nabla \nabla^{2} \rho ( \varvec{r} )$$ within the QTAIM framework, different “atomic graphs” (corresponding to different hybridizations) are found for each atom depending on the molecular context, reflecting how the whole molecule affects each atom. In this way, the whole molecular system imposes certain geometry onto each atom, and every atom exhibits different ontological modality. On the Metaphysical side, for X. Zubiri real things (denoted as “de Suyo”) are system of different notes (adventitious, constitutional and essential). The physical essence is the subsystem of essential notes (notes-of) with a coherence unity. Every note is grounded on the essence. The unity of the system is present somehow in every note-of beforehand, and every essential note-of turns towards the other (“respectivity”). The essence determines the position of each note within the system, and hence is the grounding for modality of the notes. By conflating both “theories” and taking the atoms as essential notes, we propose the concept of “Molecule in atoms-of” or “atoms-of in Molecules”. Within the course of a chemical reaction the atoms-of modified their “of” as required by the new molecular unity being formed, and eventually change their modality. The validity to the Zubiri’s statements, is attained by evaluating necessity (□) and possibility (◊) in a set-up of finite accessible “possible worlds”.

El problema de la muerte en Xavier Zubiri

El artículo analiza el concepto de la «muerte» en la filosofía del pensador español Xavier Zubiri, quien rechazó la habitual división del ser humano en cuerpo (mortal) y alma (inmortal), y propuso una concepción del hombre entendido como «totalidad psico-física». Esta concepción implica necesariamente la mortalidad del individuo, pero bajo la influencia del teólogo francés M.-É. Boismard, Zubiri plantea un concepto de «resurrección» del hombre como un todo, considerando un error hablar solo de una resurrección del cuerpo. Zubiri piensa que, gracias a su libertad, el sujeto puede construir una «figura eterna» de su ser, que permanece para siempre, y alcanza la gracia de la vida eterna, dependiendo de que dicha figura la haya construido el sujeto en versión o aversión hacia la realidad suprema: Dios.

Re-legazione e volontà di verità: lo spazio della libertà di fronte al «potere del reale» nel pensiero di X. Zubiri

El presente artículo quiere profundizar el nexo entre voluntad de verdad y relegación en la filosofía de Xavier Zubiri, en una perspectiva diacrónica e sincrónica, en un análisis del problema del concepto de «poder de lo real» al interior del camino personal del filósofo en modo de determinar cuál es el espacio que el hombre tiene por liberarse de su fundamentalidad: agnosticismo, indiferencia y ateísmo.

Implicaciones para la estética del pensamiento de Xavier Zubiri

En este ensayo se hace una valoración de la situación actual de la estética y se estudia cuál es la aportación del pensamiento del filósofo español X. Zubiri a la misma. Para ello se reconstruye a grandes rasgos la historia del pensamiento estético hasta el momento actual de modo que sean claramente perceptibles las aportaciones a la estética de la propuesta del pensador español, a la vez que las posibilidades que abre para un desarrollo ulterior de esta disciplina. Para mostrar las aportaciones a la estética de Zubiri se exponen las características fundamentales de su pensamiento en las que destaca su raigambre estrictamente metafísica. Esta raigambre metafísica permite evitar un reduccionismo hermenéutico de la estética tal y como ocurre según el autor en muchas propuestas actuales. Por otro lado, la propuesta zubiriana de incardinar lo estético en una facultad sustantiva como es el sentimiento afectante, permite evitar el intelectualismo y rescatar la autonomía de la dimensión estética de la realidad sin reducirla al bien ni el ser neutro. La propuesta es una alternativa a la teoría de Max Scheler que, no obstante, vuelve a hacerse cargo de la estructura transcendental de la realidad como ocurría en la gran tradición metafísica occidental.

История философии Хавьера Субири

The article makes an attempt to the theoretical reconstruction of the figure of the Spanish thinker Xavier Zubiri (1898‒1983) as an original historian of philosophy on the basis of key works published both during the author’s lifetime and still out of print to give an idea of the thinker's distinctive view on development of all European philosophy. With this object in mind, we refer to the works published both during the life of the author, and going out of print to this day. Zubiri examined almost all the main topics of classical philosophy: matter and essence, evolution and the issue of free will, the history and problem of God. This great philosophical synthesis, we only need to understand and apply new regional knowledge.

Religación y Gracia en el pensamiento de Xavier Zubiri

We can find in Xavier Zubiri’s work a large reflection on the problem of God and His relationship with the human being. On this article we are looking to show what are the key ideas of this thinking from a zubirian philosophical perspective. We will also try to show how this philosophical thinking can be translated into a theology, which is able to put in relation the Creator with the creature from a dual perspective: the donation of the First and the transformation of the second.