Background
Marias Aguilera, Julian was born in 1914 in Valladolid.
Marias Aguilera, Julian was born in 1914 in Valladolid.
Studied philosophy in Madrid (1931-1936) under Gaos. Zubiri and Ortega.
Cofounder with Ortega of the Instituto de Humanidades (1948). Many academic appointments in Spain and the USA, notably at Wellesley College, (1951-1952), Harvard (1952), UCLA (1955) and Yale (1956). Member of numerous philosophical bodies in Spain, USA and Latin America.
Although he developed and extended the ideas of his mentor, the major direction of Marias’s thought is set by Ortega's ratio-vitalism. This Marias attempts to blend with Catholicism, and adds to it a detailed philosophical anthropology. According to ratio-vitalism, the fundamental reality is neither matter nor mind but life, and Marias’s acceptance of this colours all his thought, not least his extensive views concerning the nature of philosophy in general and of metaphysics in particular. Life is a task, not a datum: I must do something with my circumstances in order to survive. I must orient myself with regard to reality, and the function of philosophy is to provide that orientation with regard to what is fundamental. Accordingly, all philosophy worthy of the name is authentic, being a direct response to our condition. At the core of philosophy is metaphysics, the investigation of ultimate reality. Marias insists that existence is an interpretation of reality, not an ultimate fact. The belief in existence is a pretheoretical belief but a belief none the less. Ontology, the study of existence, is therefore something to be accounted for by metaphysics. Further, vitalism informs Marias’s attitude to Aristotelian logic, also often held to be an indispensable element of philosophy. To the vitalist such logic, with its focus on stable essences, displaces individual life from its rightful place at the focus of philosophical interest. For Marias, reality involves neither strict identities nor radical discontinuities, and any logic which regards analytic truths as the standard of knowledge will fail to do justice to its fluidity and flux. This point of view underlies Marias’s extensive writings on the history of Western philosophy. One of the most distinctive areas of Marias s thought concerns what he calls the empirical structure of human life. By this he means a set of features of № midway between its definitional properties and those elements peculiar to individual lives. Into this he puts the form of the human body, ns sexuality, language, our capacity for laughter, the rhythm of the generations, the length of time spent sleeping and the form of our settlements. These elements of our condition he regards as acquired and mutable, though long-lasting and so relatively stable. These Marias regards as an entirely proper area of concern for a philosopher, and once more this follows from his vitalist presuppositions: to live well I must understand my circumstances, and where elements of my circumstances are as important as these, no philosopher can ignore them.