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Abstract

This article highlights the importance of Father Vaz’s life and work through his thought and teaching. It shows that his thinking places ethics at the root of the contemporary crisis and highlights the permanent value of Hegel’s thinking as a means to overcome it. Father Vaz’s Hegelian interpretation is mainly examined through his book Escritos de filosofia IV (Writings of Philosophy IV), in which he summarizes Hegel’s thought, whose system places the metaphysical foundation of an ethically and politically constructed society in the idea of freedom in and for itself. This foundation, at the basis of Hegel’s theory of the state, refutes the subjective meaning of freedom in modern thought – especially the liberal – which, according to Father Vaz, is also responsible for the contemporary ethical crisis. For him, Hegel’s criticism of liberalism can be applied to Marx’s historical materialism and to real socialism, which derives from the former, since both, for different reasons, have not implemented the true conception of freedom in the organization of nations nor in the determination of their destiny; a freedom that ought to be exercised by the citizens themselves and not only in their name.­