Sistema Regional de Información
en línea para Revistas Científicas de América Latina,
el Caribe, España y Portugal

In this work, starting from the Thomistic thesis of natural law as the work of reason, the question of knowledge of natural law is addressed. In particular, the place of moral virtues in such knowledge is examined. In this regard, a question arises. On the one hand, the ability to know the content of the natural law seems to depend on the possession of a virtuous life. But, on the other hand, one has the impression that the acquisition of moral virtues depends on the knowledge of moral good. Thus, a supposed circularity arises between virtue and knowledge of natural law. As a solution, Hildebrand’s thesis is postulated, according to which the moral being has priority over the moral knowledge but emphasizing that it is only a question of the precedence of a certain degree of the virtuous being (the reverent attitude towards values) which is indispensable for consenting to a certain degree of moral knowledge (the general apprehension of good value and bad disvalue).

In this article I propose that the notions of being and essence according to Aquinas and Suárez are different ways of conceiving the contingency of entities, but not mutually exclusive conceptions. On the contrary, I consider that, Aquinas by putting the emphasis of being on the extramental while Suárez on the intelligible, push us to find a common ground to avoid the extremes of naïve realism and idealism. First, I analyze the notions of potency and act in Aquinas and Suárez. Second, I develop its impact on the distinction between being and essence. Finally, I compare both metaphysics to better delimit our consideration of the real, both in the extramental and conceptual spheres.

 This paper aims to outline the principles of phenomenology of silence based on the texts Meaning without language and the task of phenomenology by Antonio Zirión Quijano and Maurice Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of perception. Our paper investigates what is known as the "limit zones" of phenomenology. It proposes a conception of its method that links the Husserlian roots of the method with the findings derived from our study of silence as a phenomenon given to consciousness. We will enunciate the features of what we have called the "phenomenology of silence", which focuses on reviewing the limited modalities of appearing. Thus, we will review what has been considered an issue that exceeds the scope of phenomenology since silence had been analysed only as "natural silence" (silence of absence) over subjective silence. Here we will discuss the belief that phenomenology only partially deals with regions of being and that its methodology is insufficient to explain the world as a whole when confronted with phenomena such as silence.

Most people have claimed that religious beliefs are constituted in the same way as factual beliefs. Eric Mandelbaum suggests a more radical view, for he claims that forming a belief, whether it is religious credence or genuine belief, is similar to having direct contact with a fact that is perceived or represented in our minds: the fixation of beliefs is an effortless and automatic process. This model of our mind’s architecture is called “the Spinozan model”. Neil Van Leeuwen, on the contrary, claims that factual beliefs characterize the background and default frame that we use for tracking truths and behaving in determined ways, whereas religious beliefs function differently. This paper aims to show that, even though Van Leeuwen’s distinction between factual beliefs and religious credences is more plausible than the Spinozan model’s presupposition that both attitudes are the same kind of attitude, the Spinozan model could still be introduced as a feature for each of those kinds.

 The aim of this contribution is to bring the reader closer to the research and teaching developed in Galicia within the scope of Theology. A science, which has a fundamental purpose, since theology itself as a discipline of knowledge must foster relationships between faith and culture, to promote a cultural and social profusion that enriches a society in continuous change. The development of the theological work, both teaching and research, within the originality of Galicia is linked both to the ecclesial and cultural tradition and to theology itself as an academic discipline. Such work shares, to a large extent, the same peculiarities as the rest of the Spanish state and Portugal, with the just disparities of the precise names that support them and the environments in which they are carried out.

Although most thinkers agree that we live in secular societies, they do not always share the same understanding of this concept. Since the philosopher Charles Taylor has exemplarily investigated the subject of secularity in his writings, I will comment on the fundamental ideas of the first volume of his book A Secular Age (2007). The three central ideas recognized in this book are studied in the three respective sections of this paper: 1) the four meanings of secularity, 2) the titanic change in Western society and 3) the historical itinerary of such titanic change from the transcendent to the immanent.

For Paul, the Spirit was bestowed on all of human civilization. While Christianity broadens the scope of the salvation message for pagans; also, in some way, it restricts and rethinks it, prioritizing and valuing completely new aspects such as freedom of choice and the preference for the excluded and/or “what is small”. Jesus would not have been incarnated to provide Abba, as he calls God, a victim for the sins of the world, but to make visible and liquidate the link between the sacred and violence. In this sense, the way in which Jesus explains Abba - what he looks like and not what he is - would be in line with how an explanation of the divine is required by the Christian believer. The Spirit in Paul, under our understanding, allows, through his personal and community experience, to prepare for the future but from the present. In this sense, the experience of the Christian is of an eschatological type; that is, it lives at the beginning of the end. Specifically, asceticism was constituted as a catalyst for accommodating the Spirit in man: a preparation of the body for a state of transfiguration at the time of the long-awaited eternal life. Christianity does not blur the importance of life; conversely, the Spirit, as a code of ethics, would allow man to access, in this life, the eternal life promised by the messiah.

This article uses the tension between the unconditioned and the conditioned that Kant detects in the human being and that he presents in the Critique of Pure Reason in order to account for the internal dynamics of the philosophy of religion. In this sense, the work presents the way in which Kant leaves behind dogmatic metaphysics to give way to another, which is the result of the "constriction of reason". Next, the ways in which an attempt is made to condition the unconditioned are presented, both in the case of freedom, in that of thought and in that of spiritual life. The solution to the problem that Kant detects is offered in the abandonment of rational theology and the passage to the resources of critical philosophy, phenomenology, pragmatism or critical theory.

 The dialectical imagination, the poetic imagination and the experimental imagination, are addressed as three types of imagination useful to account for debates and philosophical positions on issues such as "second nature", therapy and poetry in the analytic tradition or the consequences of the empirical turn in more recent times. Once this has been made explicit, dialogues are established with Donald Davidson's approaches to subjective experience and truth, and reference is made to melancholy as an explanatory fold in the subject's relationship with the world.