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Title: The Sense of the World
Author: Andrés Ortiz-Osés
Translated by David Sumares
Series: Contemporary European Cultural Studies
soft cover
170 pp.
$20.00 US
ISBN 978-1-888570-34-2
January, 2008
The Sense of the World, by one of the most influential of Spanish philosophers, is the author's first book in English and effectively
summarizes his entire body of work, which can be divided into four categories: hermeneutical treatises; symbolic and mythological studies, especially interpretations
of Basque mythology; metaphysics of the sense of life; and aphorisms. In this work, Ortiz-Osés places the question of the meaning of the world in the context of a
philosophy of the soul, a key concept of which is affective reason. He takes into account the meaning of existence and compares several world views with a special
emphasis on a Latin/Hispanic-American worldview.
Contents
Foreword by Manuel Sumares
Author’s Preface: The Sense of the World
Overture: Interview
General Introduction: A Philosophy of the Soul
I. Symbolical Hermeneutics of Sense
Affective Reason
Myth and Belief: Animism and Magic
Homo-Implicator: Reality and Symbolism
Appendix: The Sense of Existence
II. Cultural Mythologies
Cultural Mythologies
Hispanic Mythology
The Hispanic Notion of Sense
Appendix: The Latin Christ
A Conclusion of Sorts: A Manifesto of Sense
Excursus: On Heideggerian Being
Coda: Love and Humor Aphoristic
Appendix
Bibliography
From the Preface
The sense of the world lies outside the world (Wittgenstein): but the human sense of the world lies within the world.
… The Sense of the World offers the key to our symbolical hermeneutics of sense. In fact, it is about re-examining the radical question of the human sense of life
that has suffered over time the effects of a double boycott: on the one hand, by the extremism of absolute truth/reason; and on the other, by the extremism of
self-complacent non-sense and nihilism. However, it is precisely in this regard that the question of sense, always already under the threat of falling into some
kind of fundamentalist absolutism, must avoid being projected in terms of an absolute truth, or even an absolute relativism. The point we shall endeavor to
make is that sense is relational, mediating and mediated, inter-linguistic, intercultural, transversal and open. Because of all this the sense of the world is a
world of sense.…
Author
Andrés Ortiz-Osés, philosopher, theologian and anthropologist, is a professor of hermeneutics at the University of Deusto in Bilbao, Spain. He earned a PhD in
hermeneutics from the Institute of Philosophy in Innsbruck, where he studied under Gadamer and Coreth. He was a member of the Eranos group, inspired by
C.G. Jung, and subsequently became the principal proponent of Jungian theories among Spanish and Latin American intellectuals. He is the author of more
than thirty books and is the founder of symbolic hermeneutics, a philosophical trend that gave a symbolic twist to north European hermeneutics.