Finally, we should note in more detail g) his contribution to combatting various types of necessitarian and providentialist theories of history, along with teleological philosophies of history in the field of historiology (see ‘A Historiologia de Sílvio Lima’, in Estudos em homenagem a João Francisco Marques, 2003) in his Determinismo, Acaso e Previsão na História (1943) and in his Lições in Theory of History (1957–64) from Coimbra, promoting a comprehensivist paradigm and a historic hermeneutic that took time to triumph, let it be said, because the very postulates of the public libertas philosophandi and the essential civic requirement for democratic dialogue, starting on the university campus, were proscribed as the last circle of hell.

Let us follow Sílvio Lima’s career in an attempt to appreciate the great coherence in his trajectory: a) as early as 1927, in his discussion of the Ethics of J.-M. Guyau and the ‘contemporary moral crisis’ he proposes an itinerary through neo-criticism and a return to the philosophies of the subject, particularly those of a neo-Kantian type followed by German idealism of Marburgo and Baden, and in the manner of Brunschwicg (via J. de Carvalho and António Sérgio) he seeks the rational conscience of oneself (relational and dialogic, from the Fichtean dialectic of the I / not-I). This would be the gnosiological foundation for an appreciation of the movement of the world and of existence, taking as its corollary Cartesian rationalism, constructive, relational and epistemic, against the grain of popular and abbreviated versions of Aristotelic rationalism, taxonomic (or categorical) and ontological, which, by the theological hand of the neo-Tomist summa (particularly in the version of the perennial philosophy) and the empirical parallax of realism was washing over the university benches. And of course he rose up against the redemptory and messianic irrationalisms that in the 1920s and 30s were ploughing devastating chasms in Europe. In summary, the epistemic rule becomes normative over the course of his work: in calling the individual to the mobilizing space of the spirit, he is given a universalizing dimension that makes him communicate with the place of otherness, already his own, since the Socratic kromenon, the common utility or common good is ‘to know in common’. For this reason he developed his ethics in the wider referential framework of the philosophy of history, of the effort to secularize knowledge, from the Greeks to Spinoza, from idealist rationalism to the recent discussions then going on in academic fora. The historicity of the spiritus, the correlated and diachronic cultural awareness, lead to the superbiological that the human is (if the bio-sociological determinism does not extend to the self-determination of the Being), an emotional animal who nevertheless dominates the Nature where he is created and revealed. As the only historical animal, Man makes himself man, he is an automaton of the res publica he inhabits and makes his own and from which he constructs his norms, within a free adherence to a Lebensphilosophie, a ‘metaphysical hypothesis’ (in Guyau’s sense), upon whom only liberty confers the fullness of meaning and the only true moral criterion, in the optic of a secularizing world-view.

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