This book has been thought out over the course of twenty years; its subject matter has been with me ever since I began my philosophical exploration of human reality. As the reader will see, its greatest intellectual novelty is its theme: the discovery of that level of reality which I call the empirical structure of human life. I have written this Metaphysical Anthropology since December 1968, in sixteen unbroken months of work despite my moves from place to place: in Madrid, in Soria, in Indiana, in Madrid again. I have written it in a single mental movement, one demanded by the systematic nature of its theory and by its literary form. And I have tried to make it, despite its complexity, a relatively short book, for it must be read and not merely leafed through or consulted. The reason for this is its dramatic structure, the structure which corresponds to philosophical theory. Its place within the body of my work is obvious: the presentation of the philosophical past ( History of Philosophy ), which brings us up to the present day, had to be followed by the specific setting in motion of philosophy as theory of human life ( Reason and Life: The Introduction to Philosophy ). I then had to present a view of that life in its collective concreteness ( The Social Structure ). Now, this further step tries to understand human life in its empirical structure, as we find it realized in “man.” The fact that I have explained the total genealogy of my thought so minutely, in so many books, permits me to dispense with notes in this book in order to present its trajectory in a clear and unencumbered way.   Julián Marías

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