Background
Amor Rulbal, Angel was born in 1869 in San Verismo de Barro (Pontevedra).
Amor Rulbal, Angel was born in 1869 in San Verismo de Barro (Pontevedra).
Santiago de Compostela Seminary. Universities of Barcelona and Gregoriana (Rome).
1897-1898, Professor of Theology, University of Santiago de Compostela. 1905-1930, Canon of the cathedral of Santiago de Compostela. 1898-1930, Professor of Canonical Law, University of Santiago de Compostela.
Amor Ruibal’s primary philosophical interest centred, due doubtless to his training and professional position as a canon of the catholic church, on the search for a philosophical foundation for theology, much of which was based on the latest scientific advances, and which sought to integrate the contemporary state of science with the details of faith and its dogmatic systemization. José Luis Abellán considers that this investigation signified the ‘arrival at the border’ where contemporary philosophy met with postmodernity. The label of ‘correlation’ attached to Amor Ruibal's work evades the subjectivity of naming it transcendental relativism’. The universe is seen as a system of related beings, a network of organically and systematically related correlative elements, and thus an ontological reality, rather than a simple complex of pure relations. This is supported by a unitary vision of the universe in which the individualized substances are seen not as autonomous but as ‘mosaics’ or ‘links’: the universe is a system of correlative primary elements characterized by their being universal, natural, given, ontological, intrinsic, essential and organic, although also relative to that which they constitute and to the cosmic entirety. These primary elements are conceived of as being essentially and absolutely relative, indivisible, irreducible, incomplete, lacking in ‘thingness’, indefinable, unintelligible, unexplainable and unknowable. The only access to them is through a simple intuitive notion, or ‘understanding’, of things that can be described but not defined, belonging to a prelogical order presented as an affirmation: it is elsewhere defined as a ‘simple intellectual presentiality’. This type of knowledge is distinguished from two other forms: sensible knowledge, that presented to us by the things themselves; and intellectual knowledge, that exercised on the matter provided by us via the first type of knowledge. This correlationism is contextualized by what he terms a universal dynamism, or causality, which converts this correlationism into a continuous and universal dynamism with the appearance of evolutionism, although this evolutionism is ‘organic’ and ‘perfective’ leading to an imminent finality, and it is this, combined with the notion that the universe in totality being relative is what provides proof of the existence of God: the contradiction between total being and absolute nothingness marks out the contigency that separates these states and, thus, a necessary being is postulated. Alain Guy notes that Amor Ruibal has been likened to A. N. Whitehead, and whilst philosophically speaking there may be certain resonances between the two, his thought has been much more linked to a particularly Spanish vein of philosophical enquiry, that of the connections between theology and philosophy. Zubin's work Sobre la esencia, published in 1962, was clear about its influence. Critique has been centred on his critical avoidance of the writings of other philosophers, and his tendency to radicalize those views with which he disagrees.