Background
Zaragüeta y Bengoechea, Juan was born in 1883 in Orio (near San Sebastian), Spain.
Zaragüeta y Bengoechea, Juan was born in 1883 in Orio (near San Sebastian), Spain.
After early theological training in Saragossa, Zaragüeta studied Philosophy at Louvain (1905-1908).
Returning to Spain, he assumed the Chair of Philosophy at the Seminario Conciliar in Madrid (1908-1917), and later occupied chairs of Religion and Moral Philosophy, of Law and Economics, of Pedagogy and of Rational Psychology at some of the most distinguished Spanish academic institutions. Retired from teaching in 1953. Remained a member of many learned societies in Spain and abroad.
One of the most eminent and revered Spanish academics of his day. Zaragüeta's thought is ablend of Louvainian neo-Thomism with a discreet version of the ratio-vitalism of Garcia Morente and Ortega y Gasset. Zaragiieta was also an appreciative though far from uncritical student of Bergson, and was greatly interested in the psychological sciences in his period. Further, he was one of the first of his countrymen to highlight the importance of careful linguistic studies to philosophy. Whilst Zaragiieta accepted neo-Thomism as thephilosophiaperennis, he did not regard it as unmodifiable in the light of recent discoveries. He quoted with approval Cardinal Mercier's principle: vetera novis augere el perficere. All these traits are manifested in his magnum opus, the three-volume Filosofía y vida, a work of immense scope reminiscent of the sumtna of the scholastic tradition. The first volume is a phenomenological description of mental life, individual and social, focusing on the objects of consciousness, conscious activity and the subject of consciousness, the self-identical T. The work ends with an analysis of the synthetic process of human life in terms of three basic categories: quantity, quality and vivacity. Volume II sets out what Zaragiieta characterizes as the ‘vital problems' arising from the processes of conceptualization and the making of judgements, both theoretical and practical, and suggests methodologies appropriate to their solution. The final volume contains Zaragiieta’s solutions to the problems he has discussed in the earlier books, and he outlines his own ideas on biology, history, cosmology and the relation of man and god. Philosophy itself emerges as the culmination of science, with at its heart a metaphysics aspiring to knowledge of the transcendent. A subject to which Zaragiieta returns often is the theory of value. He contends that value is distinct from being, and, when it occurs, adds something to the latter. The relation of value to being is 'la condición del adjetivo respecto al sustantivo’. He argues that valuation is a special act of consciousness distinct from cognition, and that evaluative modes of thought have their own unique logic: for example, the intensity of occurrence of a moral quality can affect its nature, the same not being true of non-evaluative qualities. The judgements made as a result of evaluations are truth-functional. He is careful to stress that to consider values as discrete from being is only possible by means of abstraction. Our life experience is of an evaluated reality.