Antonio Caso Andrade was a Mexican

Mexican people

Mexican people refers to all persons from Mexico, a multiethnic country in North America, and/or who identify with the Mexican cultural and/or national identity....

 philosopher and rector of the former Universidad Nacional de México, nowadays known as the National Autonomous University of Mexico

National Autonomous University of Mexico

The Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México is a university in Mexico. UNAM was founded on 22 September 1910 by Justo Sierra as a liberal alternative to the Roman Catholic-sponsored Royal and Pontifical University of Mexico The Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) (National Autonomous...

 from December 1921 to August 1923. Along with José Vasconcelos

José Vasconcelos

José Vasconcelos Calderón was a Mexican writer, philosopher and politician. He is one of the most influential and controversial personalities in the development of modern Mexico. His philosophy of "indigenismo" affected all aspects of Mexican sociocultural, political, and economic...

, he founded the Ateneo de la Juventud

Ateneo de la Juventud

Ateneo de la Juventud was an association of intellectuals, primarily writers and philosophers, in the years surrounding the Mexican centennial of 1910...

, a humanist

Humanism

Humanism is an approach in study, philosophy, world view or practice that focuses on human values and concerns. In philosophy and social science, humanism is a perspective which affirms some notion of human nature, and is contrasted with anti-humanism....

 group against philosophical positivism. The Athenian generation opposed Auguste Comte

Auguste Comte

Isidore Auguste Marie François Xavier Comte , better known as Auguste Comte , was a French philosopher, a founder of the discipline of sociology and of the doctrine of positivism...

 and Herbert Spencer

Herbert Spencer

Herbert Spencer was an English philosopher, biologist, sociologist, and prominent classical liberal political theorist of the Victorian era....

’s philosophical views, giving credence to and expanding on the ideas of Henri Bergson, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and José Enrique Rodó

José Enrique Rodo

José Enrique Rodó Piñeyro was a Uruguayan essayist. He called for the youth of Latin America to reject materialism, to revert back to Greco-Roman habits of free thought and self enrichment, and to develop and concentrate on their culture.He cultivated an epistolary relationship with important...

. Andrade opposed rationalism

Rationalism

In epistemology and in its modern sense, rationalism is "any view appealing to reason as a source of knowledge or justification" . In more technical terms, it is a method or a theory "in which the criterion of the truth is not sensory but intellectual and deductive"...

. His group the ateneistas believed in a moral, willing, and spiritual individual being.

Philosophical Work

In the summer of 1909, Caso presented his critiques of positivism

Positivism

Positivism is a a view of scientific methods and a philosophical approach, theory, or system based on the view that, in the social as well as natural sciences, sensory experiences and their logical and mathematical treatment are together the exclusive source of all worthwhile information....

 in a series of conferences later expanded in the third edition by the Athenians of Youth. He was inspired by the Christian

Christian

A Christian is a person who adheres to Christianity, an Abrahamic, monotheistic religion based on the life and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth as recorded in the Canonical gospels and the letters of the New Testament...

 philosophical tradition, in particular by Blaise Pascal

Blaise Pascal

Blaise Pascal , was a French mathematician, physicist, inventor, writer and Catholic philosopher. He was a child prodigy who was educated by his father, a tax collector in Rouen...

 and Tolstoy. Caso distinguishes three aspects of human existence: economic, aesthetic, and moral. Caso refuted Gabino Barreda

Gabino Barreda

Gabino Barreda was a Mexican physician and philosopher oriented to French positivism.After participating in the U.S.-Mexican War defending his country as a volunteer, he studied medicine in Paris . There he became acquainted with Auguste Comte's doctrine, before his first publications in philosophy...

’s thesis and the first Justo Sierra

Justo Sierra

Justo Sierra Méndez , was a prominent Mexican writer, journalist, poet and political figure of the second half of the nineteenth century. He was the son of Mexican novelist Justo Sierra O'Reilly, who is credited with inspiring his son with the spirit of literature...

 that the future of Mexico was built primarily on basis of a scientific doctrine. In the work "Catholicism

Catholicism

Catholicism is a broad term for the body of the Catholic faith, its theologies and doctrines, its liturgical, ethical, spiritual, and behavioral characteristics, as well as a religious people as a whole....

, Jacobinism and Positivism" included in the book Discursos a la nacion mexicana (Discourses to the Mexican nation) Caso deepens his criticism of two of the hegemonic ideologies in the late nineteenth century: Jacobinism

Jacobin (politics)

A Jacobin , in the context of the French Revolution, was a member of the Jacobin Club, a revolutionary far-left political movement. The Jacobin Club was the most famous political club of the French Revolution. So called from the Dominican convent where they originally met, in the Rue St. Jacques ,...

 (or extreme liberalism) and positivism. The supporters of the first accuse them of ignoring reality, while those in the second get the blame for the alleged inevitability of reality. Antonio Caso is a pioneer in the Mexican philosophy that was developed later by Samuel Ramos

Samuel Ramos

Dr. Samuel Ramos was a Mexican philosopher and writer.Ramos was born in Zitácuaro, Michoacán, and in 1909 entered the Colegio de San Nicolás in Hidalgo. He published his first works in the school's student publication Flor de Loto...

, Leopoldo Zea Aguilar

Leopoldo Zea Aguilar

Leopoldo Zea was a Mexican philosopher.One of the integral Latin Americanism thinkers in history, Zea became famous thanks to his master's thesis, El Positivismo en México , with which he applied and studied positivism in the context of his country and the world during the...

, and Octavio Paz

Octavio Paz

Octavio Paz Lozano was a Mexican writer, poet, and diplomat, and the winner of the 1990 Nobel Prize for Literature.-Early life and writings:...

among others. In his book El problema de México y la ideología nacional, (The problem of Mexico and the nation ideology) published in 1924, Caso argues Mexico’s biggest problem is the lack of unity (racial, cultural and social). Towards the end of his life, Caso was influenced by the philosophies of Husserl, Scheler, and Heidegger, especially Husserl, whose ideas were reflected in the book La filosofía de Husserl, El acto ideatorio, La persona humana y el estado totalitario y El peligro del hombre. (Husserl's philosophy, ideatory The act, The human person and the totalitarian state, and the danger of man).

Works

• La filosofía de la intuición , 1914 The philosophy of intuition, 1914

• El concepto de la historia universal , 1918 The concept of universal history, 1918

• Principios de estética , 1925 Principles of aesthetics, 1925

• El acto ideatorio , 1934 The act ideatorio, 1934

• El peligro del hombre , 1942 The danger of man, 1942