The Otherness of Philosophy. Miguel de Unamuno and the Role of Reason

Abstract

Spanish thinking has till the beginning of the 20^th Century been marginalised within the history of European philosophy due to its literary form and lack of systematic doctrines, but especially due to the idea of reason. Speculative reason never had the same influence on Spanish thinking as it did on thinking in the rest of Europe, and with Miguel de Unamuno the idea of reason and its philosophical use becomes explicitly problematized. The present study analyses and discusses the definition and the function of reason in the philosophy of Unamuno. It analyses the relationship between reason and language and between reason and belief. Also the consequences of Unamuno’s scepticism towards the primacy of reason are discussed in relation to his vision of man and to his philosophical method.