Some Lessons in Metaphysics
By: by José Ortega y Gasset. Translated from the Spanish by Mildred Adams.
Publisher: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.
Published: 1970
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng; spa
Translation of: Unas lecciones de metafísica
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 158
Copyright date: 1969
Notes: Originally published under the title "Unas lecciones de metafísica", Alianza, Madrid, 1966.
Table of contents: title: Note by the Spanish Publishers
pagenum: 7; title: Translator's Preface
pagenum: 9; label: I
title: The false elements in studying. Metaphysics and the need for it. Antagonism between the studies and the creator of science. Curiosity and preoccupation. The tragedy of pedagogy. Culture without roots; a return to barbarity. Question and answer. "Doing" and the justification of metaphysics.
pagenum: 13; label: II
title: Metaphysics and basic orientation. Genuine orientation and ficticious orientation. The person himself and the conventional personality. Life is what we do and what happens to us. The attributes of life. Life is evidential. The world is what affects us. Life is always unforseen. To live is to feel ourselves forced to decide what we are going to be. To live is, above all, to collide with the future.
pagenum: 28; label: III
title: The difference between 'reparar' (to be conscious of) and 'contar con' (to rely on). Revision and correction of what has been set forth. No one can leap away from his own life. 'To make a science' is something that happens in 'our lives'. Life as biography. What is heaven? Evidence and truth. Life brings us many obligations. Reflection: the two 'nows'.
pagenum: 46; label: IV
title: The three elements of the encounter. Meeting the 'I'. Meeting the circumstances, the surroundings; temporal and social charateristics of the circumstance. The way of being there in the circumstance. Homogeneous and heterogeneous being there. To live is for me to exist outside myself. Parenthesis on the semantics of existing: active and effective being. New analysis of 'being there'. The immaterial character of circumstance.
pagenum: 59; label: V
title: Circumstrances (surroundings) and what we know about them. Naked life and unthinking our thoughts. Circumstance (what lies about me) and I form a part of my life. The various things one does with circumstances. Thinking is not a primary 'doing'. Earlier presence of 'counting on'. The two ways of being of things; thinking them and living them. The primacy of interrogation and its pre-intellectual significance. Things are primarily conveniences and inconveniences. The emptiness of being.
pagenum: 74; label: VI
title: Revision of the itinerary. The repertory of possibilities in the environment. Destiny and liberty. To live is to exist here and now.
pagenum: 89; label: VII
title: The general structure of our life and its components. what kind of 'doing' is thinking about something? To think, to say, a commonplace. The necessity of being.
pagenum: 95; label: VIII
title: The question of being. The myth of the expulsion from Paradise. Method and the contemplative life. The theories of 'doing' confront the emptiness of being. Resort tonthe social 'I' of the people. The assumptions of this resort. From nothing to nobody. The system of essential actions. Antagonism between tradition and reason. Again, what is the earth? Again, the immateriality of circumstance, environment; its usefulness.
pagenum: 101; label: IX
title: The two tables: the substantial thing and the space populated by fields of force. The first table is neither the one nor the other. The game of being.
pagenum: 113; label: X
title: Our road toward metaphysics. Knowing as 'knowing what to hold on to'. Construction of the world in the face of problematical surroundings. Metaphysics is a task that is inevitable. Metaphysics is solitude.
pagenum: 118; label: XI
title: A first conviction about the whole. What is it that there truly is? First thesis: things and their entirety, or the world; their attributes. Second thesis: idealism; ingenuousness and caution.
pagenum: 124; label: XII
title: The point of departure is insecurity. Which is the fundamental reality? The realist thesis complicates thought. Conformity and anticonformity. Thought and its forms. The idealist thesis does away with the outside world.
pagenum: 132; label: Lesson XIII
title: We seek a fundamental truth—universal and independent. The idealist thesis complicates a reality which is different from thought. The active being of thought and the objective being of thought. The earlier position of reality. Reality is my coexistence with things.
pagenum: 141; label: Lesson XIV
title: Revision of the analyzed thesis. Descartes's formula. The immediate characteristics of doubt. Idealism's nightmare. Descartes's two courses. Idealism's sleight of hand. The hypothesis of hallucination. Realism perisiting in idealism; that reality is the independent. Reality is interdependence and coexistence. The name of basic and absolute reality in the immediate present . . . living. Transcendence and immanence of life.
pagenum: 148