This paper evokes the life and the work of Vasco de Magalhães-Vilhena as a communist militant and a Marxist philosopher. These two dimensions are inseparable in his life’s exemplariness as much as in the intensive intellectual activity through which he influenced the philosophical culture of his lifetime as much as in the writings he left to the further generations. The PCP, having donated the Magalhães-Vilhena Library to the School of Arts and Humanities (Faculdade de Letras) of the University of Lisbon, recognizes the value of this homage in the school where the foregoing professor lectured and fi nished his teaching practice.

We analyze the criticism of Vasco de Magalhães-Vilhena to the idealist conception of the history of philosophy, exercised from his own conception of philosophy as a form of social consciousness and ideology, submitted to the processual dynamics of time and history. In this sense, it is important to underline the way in which the conception of history is rejected as a discipline that deals with the contingent and the accidental, in opposition to which the ideal of a perennial philosophy would rise and the consequent valorization of immutability, removing what is historical of the essence of the philosophical.

This paper aims to analyze some theses of Vasco de Magalhães-Vilhena regarding the problem of knowledge, namely, the so-called theory of the “reflex”. The point of departure is the critic the author addresses to António Sérgio, whose philosophical position is correctly characterized as Neo-kantian Idealism. Magalhães-Vilhena aims to link the doctrine of the reflex, inspired by the research of the Russian physiologist I. Pavlov, to the concept of reflection proposed by Hegel in the Second Part of the Science of Logic. In this paper I question the legitimacy of this connection. At last, confronting the standpoint of Magalhães-Vilhena regarding gnosiological issues (whose corollary is the dependence of sense-data from physical stimuli) I propose an analysis of the phenomenon of knowledge based in the principles of intentional analysis endorsed by Edmund Husserl.

In his seminal work of 1939 about the idea of progress, published and awarded in the University of Coimbra intellectual milieu, the young Vasco Magalhães-Vilhena wrote what is probably the first major philosophical essay in the Portuguese language, deeply connected with a Marxist world vision. The essay is a well-established academic master-piece, where the philosophical esotericism, underlined by Leo Strauss, is intensively at work, disguising, with some areas of deliberately ambiguity, almost completely the traces of Marx and his larger constellation involving authors like Engels and Feuerbach. What is entirely visible to the attentive reader is the subtle mind of the writer, and his capacity to address important topics of social and political philosophy, like those linked to the dialectical understanding of contemporary capitalism and its intrinsic contradictions, both as an economic model and a civilization paradigm.

The idea of progress becomes intelligible only when coupled with the idea of revolution. This last concept, coming from astronomy, entered the social sciences only in the seventeenth century. The concept of revolution differs according to whether we follow it within a Copernican conception or a Ptolemaic conception of progress and historical becoming. So, all the reflection to be made presupposes that the revolution will reach its goal only when the orbit that progress continues to describe is completed. On the way, History and progress have only known revolutions, riots, restorations, counter-revolutions.

The present text, rather than taking as its object the bibliography and/or biography of Vasco de Magalhães-Vilhena or presenting succinctly a theme or themes that captivated him, intends instead to use one or another episodic reference of his texts. In this case, it intends to use the references that refer, as the title announces, to the Marxist critique of Pragmatism. Criticism that the honoree will not have developed, however, he pointed out. Maurice Cornforth is the author for whom Magalhães-Vilhena refers the essentials of criticism to Pragmatism. To this end, it starts from the well-known maxim of Pragmatism accompanying some of its repercussions (gnosiological, ontological and political) based on the reflection of this British author.

The thoughts of Magalhães-Vilhena concerning the relation between science and ideology are a contribution to enlighten the philosophical implications of the groundings of science, something that was under the interested look of the portuguese philosopher. It is having in mind the double meaning of science as productive force and as “manifestation of society’s spiritual life” that Magalhães-Vilhena guides his investigations in which he reveals the intimate relation between science, tecnique and social structures. For the author, it is necessary to perform that “criticism of principle” that reveals the positioning of each ideological tendency. Nowadays, quantum mechanics still rises a number of philosophical problems. Paying tribute to Vilhena’s work, I try to show the necessity of thinking in which way the different interpretations of quantum mechanics bear, in the roots of their oppositions, that most fundamental confrontation between materialism and idealism. I therefore pretend to show the pertinence and topicality of such “criticism of principle”.

Having a personal testimony of some less known, or completely unknown elements concerning the biographic sphere as starting point, an attempt has been made to reveal in what extent these aspects influence on the definition of the philosophical researcher profile, and in what way do they determine a methodological option, an intellectual attitude, an epistemological thought. Attention is focused on the main problem of the unity of science, critically analysing how this problem is put into equation, his complexity, the issues that derive from it and the building of an alternative view, different from that of the Wiener Kreis, of the logical empiricism: a materialistic epistemology overcoming or surpassing the formalist conception of the unity of science.

O tema deste artigo – as duas primeiras edições críticas de inéditos de Magalhães-Vilhena – é antecedido por um sobrevoo do seu pensamento: o marxismo, o neokantismo nos anos 30 e, depois de 1945, os seus trabalhos na Sorbonne e no CNRS. O autor do artigo colaborou com M.-V. em Paris, após 1970. A primeira edição de inéditos, designada por Estudos Inéditos de Filosofia Antiga (2005), reúne em tradução portuguesa 3 estudos, ricos de ideias e de sugestões, coevos das teses de Doutoramento sobre Sócrates (Sorbonne 1949), bem como anotações esparsas e um trabalho incompleto dos anos 60 sobre a blocagem social do desenvolvimento técnico e científico na cidade antiga. Quanto à monografia António Sérgio. O Idealismo Crítico: Génese e estrutura. Raízes Gnosiológicas e Sociais. Estudo de História Social das Ideias (2013), é um estudo exaustivo e inacabado (que se prolongou por mais de 20 anos) da filosofia neokantista de António Sérgio. M.-V. destaca aí com a sua habitual proficiência “os ensinamentos positivos” que essa filosofia “indubitavelmente contém”, discutindo-a “sem compromissos ideológicos impossíveis”, mas com a largueza de ânimo “que um pensamento com a sua valia exige”.

The texts of Vasco de Magalhães-Vilhena which compose Fragmentos sobre Ideologia were written in the 1960s. Firstly, we characterize the political and theoretical context in which the texts were written, as well as the scope of their reception in 2015. Secondly, we underline the following four key issues developed by the author: the restricted and the general sense of ideology in Marx and Engels’ works; the continuity and discontinuity relations between ideology and science; the social and gnosiological roots of idealism; the relation between idea and matter.

Thinking Nature Today, at the advent of the Anthropocene, combines different scenarios, sometimes antagonistic, in the derivations of a territory whose borders are still defining. Between the “green economy” and the contamination of animal-environmental studies and ethics, we take the man-woman and human-nonhuman oppositions as a focus. We address the ecophilosophical tendencies that recognize the parallelism between the domain of feminine nature and the domain of Nature, and register the masculine-feminine dualism, the repercussions of androcentrism and the split imposed by the mechanistic thought in the vision of the interdependence of the natural world. At the intersection of ecofeminism with some ecocinematic production, we review the ecocritical convergences of the human-nature and man-woman relationship, and the close relation between ecological feminisms and ethics of care of non-human comprehensiveness. We note the analogy between the two “organisms”, the old and the contemporary, and the urgency of an epistemological reformulation, signaled by the objectification of Woman and Nature.