Miguel Reale, the Brazilian philosopher of law, historian of ideas, and politician, was a professor of law and a rector at the University of São Paulo, where he founded the Instituto Brasileiro de Filosofia and its journal, Revista brasileira de filosofia. Reale is a prolific author, and his books embrace the full range of his concerns, although his greatest contribution lies in the philosophy of law.

Reale has developed an analytical method (derived from German phenomenology and Italian historicism) that he calls "critical ontognoseological historicism." Rejecting both traditional realism and idealism, he locates the transcendental conditions of human experience and knowledge in a fundamental and inseparable correlation of subject and object. These conditions are mutually implicit and reciprocally necessary and are comprehensible only as moments in a polar dialectical process. Man's being emerges only through his own historicity, as values are realized in...