INGENIEROS, JOSÉ
(1877–1925)

José Ingenieros, the Argentine positivist metaphysician and ethical philosopher, was born in Buenos Aires. He studied, successively, medicine, psychiatry, axiology, and metaphysics and held appointments on the faculties of medicine and of philosophy and letters in Buenos Aires; he also founded the Revista de Filosofía. Ingenieros lived for some years in Germany and Switzerland. He had great influence in Latin America, and some of his works were translated into several European languages.

In Proposiciones relativas al porvenir de la filosofía (Buenos Aires, 1918), Ingenieros set forth a prospectus for a metaphysics of the "inexperiential." By the "inexperiential" he did not mean a transcendent object but those parts of the natural world that the limitations of the senses and instruments exclude from present experience. He rejected the "classical" problems of the existence and nature of God, immortality, and freedom, finding them to be not so much meaningless as falsely stated under the influence of theological and ethical orthodoxy. The legitimate problems of metaphysics are those of metacosmology, metabiology, and metapsychology; in metabiology, for example, some legitimate problems are the origin of life, the possibility of life beyond this planet, and the final purpose of life. Because its objects lie beyond experience, metaphysics cannot achieve certainty. Its statements are hypotheses, which must be logically consistent and compatible with experience. Like the sciences, the metaphysics of the future will be antidogmatic, tentative and indefinitely perfectible, and impersonal in the sense that it will be the work of many collaborators.

The ethics of Ingenieros, discussed with visionary enthusiasm in El hombre mediocre (Madrid, 1913), is naturalistic, evolutionary, and deterministic. Values or ideals are hypotheses for the perfecting of human life. They arise out of experience, are formulated by the imagination, are tested in the evolutionary process, and are at once relative and a challenge to strenuous philosophy. They are created by exceptional men, or idealists, and are often thwarted, at best conserved, by the mass of mediocre men. For these reasons El hombre mediocre is critical of democracy, although it calls for equality under law while asserting an aristocracy of merit.

See also Ethical Naturalism; Evolutionary Ethics; Metaphysics; Positivism.

Bibliography

works by ingenieros

Psicología genética. Buenos Aires, 1911.

Hacia una moral sin dogmas. Buenos Aires: Talleres gráficos de L.J. Rosso, 1917.

La evolución de las ideas argentinas, 2 vols. Buenos Aires: Talleres gráficos de L.J. Rosso, 1918–1920.

Obras completas, 24 vols. Buenos Aires, 1930–1940.

works on ingenieros

Torchia Estrada, Juan Carlos. La filosofía en la Argentina. Washington, DC: Unión Panamericana, 1961. Ch. 9.

Arthur Berndtson (1967)