Andrés Ortiz-Osés

Man’s existence is not directly related to nature as that of animals, but it is framed within a context of a mythological universe, a series of traditions and beliefs stemming from his experiences through a common psychological inheritance. (N. Frye, Words with Power).

He is an author that has pioneered the introduction of Central-European hermeneutic thinking and that of Heidegger’s School in our country. He was born in Tardienta (Huesca) in 1943 and he earned a PhD in Philosophy from the University of Innsbruck. He is Professor of Hermeneutics at the University of Deusto, where he has created a cultural study group that focuses on Heidegger’s Hermeneutics and on the symbology of Jung’s school, placing special emphasis on his own research line.

The Dictionary of Hermeneutics is the result of the labour of a large team of research, which has deeply permeated intellectual circles. His personal background is focused on the history of Hispanic thinking, with its hesitations and contradictions. We are faced with the inheritance of philosophical-theological Scholasticism as against the Marxist thinking within the rationalist criticism and nihilist existentialism. These are both impervious redoubts of the intellectual fundamentalism that has traditionally swept Hispanic thinking. His personal background runs parallel to his intellectual life, searching in European countries for the balance and serenity he could not find in Spain. There, he discovered Gadamer’s modern Hermeneutics and could have a glimpse of the attempt to establish a cultural dialogue between differing opinions in favour of a new humanist or re-humanising synthesis that took into account both classical and modern aspects, cultural tradition and the counterculture that was at its height in those 60s. All this led him to his symbolic hermeneutics and to the concepts ofco(i)mplication and fratriarcalismo that make up his thinking in his search for unifying concepts. Thus, we are faced with an original thinker, a real ontological explorer that has discovered and gained first-hand knowledge of the main philosophical currents in our century.

Patxi Lanceros

Today philosophy is in a period of inflexion, a turning point within current critical systems which, having become divorced from real issues and locked in self-complacency, seem to lose meaning and a certain complicity with the flow of history. To shake things up, there appeared the so-called post-modern philosophies, which, with their penchant for irony, run the risk of frivolizing the all-encompassing ambition characteristic of any philosophical system and becoming as sterile and ambiguous as all previous ones.

Against this autumnal panorama, philosopher Patxi Lanceros shows us how to approach the issues of the modern world from other standpoints: «I think that there are still opportunities for systematic philosophy and critical philosophy, but it will have to be a criticism incorporated into real processes and affected by them.

This author opens the way to conceiving of a system that can account for relations, for the transitions between different areas of experience, but without aspiring to any sort of end or conclusion, without de-fining or de-termining itself. A hermeneutics of meaning that is able to find a confluence between different perspectives, between the different ways of looking at a real object.

Patxi Lanceros is professor of Political Philosophy and Cultural Theory at the University of Deusto (Bilbao). Assiduous contributor to various journals and periodical publications, his works include the highly successful Diccionario de hermenéutica (co-edited with Prof. Andrés Ortiz-Osés), Avatares del hombre, El pensamiento de Michel Foucault, La modernidad cansada y otras fatigas and Política mente. De la revolución a la globalización, his most recent book is an intelligent, penetrating work that has become indispensable for deciphering these convulsive times.