Background
Pardo, Raymundo was born in 1916 in Argentina.
Pardo, Raymundo was born in 1916 in Argentina.
Professor of Epistemology and History of Science, Universidad Nacional de la Plata, 1948-1955. Same post and Director of the School of Philosophy, Universidad Nacional de Rosario, from 1956.
Pardo’s thought is in essence the outcome of the application of empiricist principles to the problems of the Aristotelian Thomist tradition. His epistemology rests on the axiom that all concepts are derived from experience, including the most abstract categories of self, reason and being. The central term announced in 1949 and used by Pardo throughout his philosophy is that of a ‘rational integrant’, defined as ‘everything which comes within the perceptual-apperceptive experience of a mind’, and so close to Locke’s use of the term ‘idea’. Any mental content is a rational integrant in this sense, and reason, in Pardo’s usage, is the conjunction of them all. Further, as a consequence of his work on both formal and empirical science, Pardo contends that all concepts are mutable, including that of being: there can be ‘knowledge without [the concept of] being’. Another way of saying that concepts change is to say that they evolve: hence Pardo’s self-description as an ‘evolutionary empiricist’. An obvious objection to this view is that, since d entails that the concept of truth is in principle also mutable, it is perniciously relativistic. Pardos reply is to agree that his views entail that truth is non-absolute; but he also insists that the rational integrant ‘truth’ is ‘characteristic’ of human thought in general.