Percorsi della fenomenologia latinoamericana. A partire da José Gaos = Pathways of Latin American phenomenology. Starting with José Gaos

Abstract

The outline of a history of phenomenology in Latin America is particularly problematic because there is not and never has been a single phenomenology or a single concept of phenomenology, and this despite the essential clarification that a fundamental reflexive junction in the American continent is represented by phenomenological studies developed in the wake of the works of Edmund Husserl. To illustrate part of this history, it is appropriate to interrogate a particularly interesting Hispanic-American phenomenologist, José Gaos, who belonged to that generation of intellectuals forced to leave Spain in the late 1930s, due to the effects of the civil war and in opposition to the Franco dictatorship. In 1921, at the beginning of his courses at the University of Madrid, his meeting with Manuel García Morente, a scholar of Husserlian phenomenology, presented as the last word in philosophy, turns out to be decisive. But as soon as Gaos is introduced to the study of Husserl, he realizes that in the Spanish culture of the 1930s the polar star was already not represented by pure Husserlian phenomenology, but by phenomenology, in Max Scheler's version, corroborated by neo-Kantian theory of knowledge in Nicolai Hartmann's peculiar version. In 1938 Gaos accepted the path of exile, moving to Mexico City, where he died in 1969, having founded a "school" to which many contemporary South American philosophical intelligences refer.