Transcendental phenomenology in Spanish perspective: As an illustration

Abstract

If in a feigned survey the rather strange question were raised, perhaps an absurd point ―like those of so many other surveys of people's opinions― about which work best expresses the historical course of phenomenology in Spain throughout the 20th century, I at least, without attempting to condition anyone's doctrine, would respond by pointing not to an original work but to a peculiar translation of Husserl into Spanish. This translation, which was preceded by a long introductory study, was published incomplete, and, as if that were not enough, it also appeared outside of Spain: in Mexico, in the uncertain year of 1942. From a printing press in Mexico City it went out to the world. on that date, in fact, the remarkable version that José Gaos prepared of Edmund Husserl's Cartesian Meditations. Or better yet, his translation of the first four meditations came to light, since the Spanish version of the fifth meditation disappeared under the rubble of the Madrid apartment where the Gaos family lived before the war (15 Marqués de Urquijo Street).