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...