The yearbook Actio philosophica is fostered by the friendship of several hundred intellectuals engaged in the teaching of philosophy from a variety of positions and perspectives. This teaching cannot be practised without one's own philosophical thinking, that is to say, without authentic personal research; nor does it make sense without an attitude that could be described globally as a commitment to the extraordinary relevance of ethics in the fields of first philosophy. These two characteristics justify the title we have chosen.

Our time, moreover, unconsciously needs the contribution of philosophical thought, which in this sense is already action. And our preference for Latin has to do with the linguistic breadth we desire: each author will publish his texts in his mother tongue - or in the language of his choice. We do not limit the dignity of the vernacular languages of philosophical thought to Greek and German. We adopt the words of the young Ortega, who referred with praise to those who would not admit as true a word that was at the same time not beautiful and that, moreover, did not incite to activity.

A good part of the motives behind the creation of our journal, the initial idea of our friend and philosopher Pablo Posada Varela (d.e.p.), have been developed over more than four decades in the seminar Fenomenología y Filosofía Primera and in the research groups that have grown out of it or that have come close to it and have developed in parallel.

This is a project of friendship, freedom and enthusiasm, without utilitarian aims. We need quality, ideas, depth, and not hundreds of quotations, compromise texts, articles aimed mainly at building a professional curriculum.

The quantity, the length of the contributions, the genre itself - from the review to the outline of a book - take second or third place. The same can be said of the style in which these contributions are written: good prose, even art, but not the familiar patterns of an academicism that has nothing to do with what the Academy was originally about. As many of us are regular readers of phenomenologists, the example of the Yearbook edited by Edmund Husserl is not lost on us…

Certainly there are many historical investigations that have achieved great philosophical importance, so that the emphasis we place on first philosophy as ethics and metaphysics in the texts we await does not mean, by any stretch of the imagination, that we are closing our field of vision to these parts of philosophy. Nor do we need to insist on the evidence that we are embracing very distant points of view or intellectual traditions.