Antonio Caso, a Mexican philosopher and diplomat, was born in Mexico City in 1883 and died there in 1946. He was a professor of philosophy at the National University of Mexico, rector of that institution, lecturer at the Colegio Nacional, and ambassador to several South American nations. He wrote voluminously over a period of three decades and had great influence as a teacher. For his sources he turned especially to Henri Bergson but also to Immanuel Kant, Arthur Schopenhauer, and Edmund Husserl.

The metaphysics of Caso emphasizes process, freedom, life, and spirit. He conceived of reality as a fluent dynamism whose operations and forms are unified organically. The subject-predicate bias of traditional logic distorts reality by its apparatus of static terms related as in a closed machine. Modern science has more insight with its realization that even the physical world eludes a rigorous determinism. The individual...