ORIGIN OF THE PROJECT In Spring of 1968 a research project concerning the scholastic philosophy in the Iberian Colonies of America was submitted to the Institute of Latin American Studies in the University of Texas by Dr.
The book is the result of my preoccupation with the phe- nomenological philosophy of Edmund Husserl during my years of post-doctoral studies (approximately since 1960).
The general aim of this book is to present a study of a dramatic genre which was a significant facet of French drama in the period from 1784 to 1834 and has never before been singled out or analyzed.
In the last hundred years, the philosophy of natural law has suffered a fate that could hardly have been envisaged by the seventeenth and eighteenth century exponents of its universality and eternity: it has become old-fashioned.
The revival of ancient Greek scepticism in the 16th and 17th centuries was of the greatest importance in changing the intellectual climate in which modern science developed, and in developing the attitude that we now call "e;The scientific outlook"e;.
Early in the first volume of his Ideen zu einer reinen Phiinomeno- logie und phiinomenologischen Philosophie, Edmund Husserl stated concisely the significance and scope of the problem with which this present study is concerned.
It is not always easy to maintain a proper balance between the delineation of cultural development within a given literary field and the claims of practical criticism.
At a time when the traditional principles of many fields have lost their power and validity, the task of philosophy may well be to look back at these traditional principles and at their inherent determinations and basic problems, while heeding every indi- cation of a transition to something new, in order to be critically open for all attempts at "e;another beginning.
This book is a revised version, with some omissions, of a Cambridge doctoral dissertation submitted in 1963: I fear that it still bears marks of its origins.
Dialogue and communication have today become central concepts in con- temporary man's effort to analyze and comprehend the major roots of con- flict that threaten our twentieth-century world.
The function of philosophy may be circumscribed as consisting in ma- king a keen analysis of the peculiar nature of the crisis-situation, as it has existed among men throughout the centuries of human history, and as it manifested itself in definite ways at the various stages of this his- tory.