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The power of the Catholic Church in Spain no doubt played a part in the lack of Spanish philosophers in history. Despite this a colourful intellectual scene existed in medieval Moorish Spain, but only José Ortega y Gasset, working a hundred years ago, has found genuine international acclaim in the centuries since. Thus I've composed a list of the 15 most well known Spanish philosophers.
Seneca the Younger (4BC-AD65)
Lucius Annaeus Seneca, was the most famous of the ancient thinkers. Born in Córdoba, Hispania, but unmistakably Roman, he took up Stoic philosophy. Stoicism is an ancient Greek school of philosophy founded at Athens by Zeno of Citium. The school taught that virtue, the highest good, is based on knowledge; the wise live in harmony with the divine Reason (also identified with Fate and Providence) that governs nature, and are indifferent to the vicissitudes of fortune and to pleasure and pain.
He pushed the practical mantra that simplicity, virtue and reason held the key to a fuller, freer existence irrespective of whatever awfulness life might throw at you. His personalised version of stoicism became known as Senequismo, with its call to respect human liberty, avoid vice and vengeance, and generally to be very nice to everyone. Senequismo made an impact in the Renaissance before resurfacing in 17th century Spain when writings like Francisco de Quevedo attempted to reconcile new reasoning with Christianity.
Averroes (1126-1198)
Ibn Rushd, better known as Averroes, was Andalusian-born but out of Arabic decent. He was the big name of the 12th century. He studied Aristotle and tried to rationalise faith with the growth of scientific knowledge, certain that religion and reason could advance together. Neither Islam nor Christianity was particularly impressed but he remained pertinent for four centuries as secular thought gathered pace throughout Europe.
His thoughts generated controversies in Latin Christendom and triggered a philosophical movement called Averroismo based on his writings. His unity of the intellect thesis, proposing that all humans share the same intellect, became one of the most well-known and controversial Averroist doctrines in the West. His works were condemned by the Catholic Church in 1270 and 1277. Although weakened by the condemnations and sustained critique by Thomas Aquinas, Latin Averroismo continued to attract followers up to the sixteenth century.
Moses Maimonides (1135-1204)
Like Averroes, Moses Maimonides was another big medieval name in Spanish philosophy. He lived at the same time as Averroes and held similar ideas, although came at them from a Jewish perspective.
He hoped to weave the rationale of philosophy, notably Aristotelian thought, with Judaism: his Dalalat al-ha’irin (c. 1190) (or Guide for the Perplexed) explained how. He also often explains the function and purpose of the statutory provisions contained in the Torah against the backdrop of the historical conditions. He was roundly booed by Jewish theologians for a good 200 years, but these days his work is considered essential to the development of Jewish thought.
Ramon Llull (theologist) (1232-1316)
One of the first notable persons of the Golden Age, was Majorcan writer, poet, mystic, mathematician, logician, martyr and theologian, Ramon Llull who set the tone in the early 14th century. With his works he tried to convert Muslims to Christianity via a series of logical, reasoned steps. He even tried making a type of machine that would, using logic, lead you to the spiritual truth. Llull was extremely prolific, writing a total of more than 250 works in Catalan, Latin, and Arabic, and often translating from one language to the others.
The Ars generalis ultima or Ars magna ("The Ultimate General Art" or "The Great Art", published in 1305, is what Llull is most well-known for. operated by combining religious and philosophical attributes selected from a number of lists. It is believed that Llull's inspiration for the Ars magna came from observing Arab astrologers use a device called a zairja (a device used by medieval Arab astrologers to generate ideas by mechanical means). Some computer scientists have adopted Llull as a sort of founding father, claiming that his system of logic was the beginning of information science.
Francisco Suárez (theologist) (1548-1617)
Suárez was a Spanish Jesuit priest, philosopher and theologian, one of the leading figures of the School of Salamanca movement. His work is considered a turning point in the history of second scholasticism, marking the transition from its Renaissance to its Baroque phases. His most important philosophical achievements were in metaphysics and the philosophy of law.
Suárez expounded his political theory and philosophy of law in De Legibus (1612; “On Laws”) as well as in the Defensio. Having refuted the divine-right theory of kingly rule, he declared that the people themselves are the original holders of political authority; the state is the result of a social contract to which the people consent. Arguing for the natural rights of the human individual to life, liberty, and property, he rejected the Aristotelian notion of slavery as the natural condition of certain men. He criticized most of the practices of Spanish colonization in the Indies in his De Bello et de Indis (“On War and the Indies”). The islands of the Indies he viewed as sovereign states legally equal to Spain as members of a worldwide community of nations.
Juan Luis Vives (theologist) (1493-1540)
Vives was a Valencian converso (convert from Judaism to Christianity), scholar and Renaissance humanist. He felt the path to knowledge lay via direct experience. He lived most of his adult life outside Spain (particularly in the Southern Netherlands), having seen close relatives being executed by the Inquisition (an ecclesiastical court established in 1478 and directed originally against converts from Judaism and Islam but later also against Protestants, it operated with great severity and was not suppressed until the early 19th century) during his childhood. He travelled to England in 1523 on Henry VIII’s initiation and took up a job tutoring Princess Mary (later Queen Mary). He also took the opportunity to lecture in philosophy at Corpus Christi College, Oxford. However in 1527, when he moaned about the king divorcing Catherine of Aragon, he was put under house arrest for six weeks before fleeing to Bruges.
His beliefs on the soul, insight into early medical practice, and perspective on emotions, memory and learning earned him the title of the padre of modern psychology. Vives was the first to shed light on some key ideas that established how we perceive psychology today.
Benito Jeronimo Feijóo y Montenegro (1676-1764)
Since the Enlightenment struggled to make headway in Catholic Spain due to its proving debate about Church and State, some progress occurred in the later 18th century with the Ilustración, as the belief in scientific reason and self-determination grew. Benito Jeronimo Feijóo y Montenegro, a Galician monk, was the prime mover.
He’s been dubbed the Spanish Voltaire, calling for an impartial investigation into the established questions of dogma and tradition. His best ideas, covering everything from medicine to education and superstition, were collected in two large volumes : Teatro crítico universal (1726-40) and Cartas eruditas y curiosas (1742-60). No one else really matched his spirit of enquiry.
Julián Sanz del Río (1814-1869)
Julián Sanz del Río brought the concept of Krausismo back from Germany. The 19th century Krausismo movement was inspired by (and named after) the German philosopher Karl Christian Friedrich Krause, but found particular currency in Spain because it gathered theology and modern liberal thinking in one conciliatory bundle. Sanz del Río laid out the details in his ideal de la humanidad para la vida (1860). God existed and was divine, that (he said) was fair enough, but humanity was a key part of that divinity. So Krausismo was a bit like worshipping humanity, recognising that man was in charge of his own affairs and could find his own path to moral growth. It fitted with the liberal ideas of the time, notable republicanism with its own thoughts on self-governance, and became a dominant force in Spanish intellectual life from the 1860s right up to the 20th century.
Francisco Giner de los Ríos (1839-1915)
After Sanz del Río set out the terms, Francisco Giner de los Ríos, a Spanish philosopher, literary critic, and educator, became the main protagonist of Krausismo, in particular using its principles for educational reform.
After taking a degree in law at the University of Granada, he went to Madrid, where he came under the influence of Julián Sanz del Río, who introduced the teachings of Krause to Spain. In 1876 Giner founded the famous Institución Libre de Enseñanza (Institution for Independent Teaching), an educational institution free from the influence of the church and the state. His works include Estudios de literatura y arte (1876; “Studies in Literature and Art”); Estudios sobre educación (1886; “Studies on Education”); Filosofía y sociología (1904; “Philosophy and Sociology”); and Resumen de filosofía del derecho (1912; “Summary of Philosophy of Law”).
José Ortega y Gasset (1883-1955)
Gasset is undoubtedly the most influential of the Spanish thinkers, he became the main Spanish philosopher of the 20th century and is perhaps the greatest thinker that Spain had yet produced. As a philosopher, socialist theorist, essayist, cultural and aesthetic critic, politician and editor-in-chief of the magazine Revista de Occidente, his speech was very broad.
He had talent for passing comment on modern civilisation, asserting that man should be judged in the context of his era and circumstances. He slated his own period : Spain was weak, divided and corrupt. Ortega blamed the intellectually flawed, mediocre masses for the deterioration of society. He pointed at the rise of Fascism and Bolshevism, blaming the ignorance of common people for their growth. It all flooded out in his best work, La Rebelión de las Masas (1930). In general, Gasset radiated to the confines of phenomenology, historicism and existentialism.
Miguel Unamuno (1864 – 1936)
Poet and philosopher, Unamuno indirectly used novels and essays to push a less structured philosophy (in a gesture recalling that of Kierkegaard), one that baulked at the idea of a systematic approach to life. He dismissed attempts to place a rationale on our existence, urging instead that we embrace faith. Unamuno suggested that you can spend a lifetime trying to figure out existence, but all of it boils down to our hopes for immortality. He conceded that this desire to live forever is irrational, but it’s there nonetheless; it’s what makes us human, what equates to our ‘faith’.
In general, his thought is marked by rationalism and positivism. The political situation of Spain of his time made him take an interest in the mechanics of history. According to him, history can be analysed only with regard to individual and anonymous stories, and not through major events or the events of great men (see Hegel’s story). What he calls intrahistoria. At the end of the nineteenth century, Unamuno left positivism to develop a Christian existentialism, close to Pascal’s thought. According to him, life is con-substantially tragic because the man knows that he must die, then reducing man to a condition of a survivor. In The Tragic Sense of Life, he thus approaches the relation of faith and reason.
Julian Marias Aguilera (1914 – 2005)
A disciple of Gasset, Julian Marias has produced a gigantic Historia de la Filosofía (1941), which is undoubtedly one of the best introductions to western philosophy of the 20th century (including that of Bertrand Russell). His 14 essays have allowed him to develop a vision of philosophy as dramatic theory, in other words, according to him the main problem of the philosopher is philosophy itself. Interestingly, the money he made from the sale of the book helped sustain his family when Franco imprisoned him for criticising the regime.
Francesc Pujois (1882-1962)
A Catalan writer-cum-philospher who imported Ramon Llull’s ideas into the first half of the 20th century, convinced that the ‘truth’ of religion would be found via scientific analysis. He was matey with both Antoni Gaudí and Salvador Dalí.
Xavier Zubiri (1898-1983)
The main man of Spanish philosophy in the second half of the 20th century was a Christian Existentialist, influenced both by religious and scientific philosophy to explore how man knows he’s actually real. Albert Einstein was a friend.
Zubiri studied theology in Rome, philosophy in Madrid (under José Ortega y Gasset) and in Freiburg, Germany, and physics and biology at the Catholic University of Leuven (Louvain), Belgium. Influenced by Roman Catholic philosophy and positive science, he created a “religation theory” of reality whereby an individual’s relation to God and his sense of self were based on fulfilment of tasks obligatory upon entering the world. He was described as the shaper of Spanish philosophy from 1940 to 1980.
After teaching history of philosophy at the universities in Madrid (1926–36) and Barcelona (1940–42), with a hiatus during the Spanish Civil War, he gained recognition as a private tutor and author. His works include Ensayo de una teoría fenomenológica del juicio (1923; “Essay on a Phenomenological Theory of Judgment”), Naturaleza, historia, Dios (1944; “Nature, History, God”), Sobre la esencia (1962; “On Essence”), and Cinco lecciones de filosofía (1963; “Five Lessons of Philosophy”). Later works included the trilogy Inteligencia sentiente (1980; “Sentient Intelligence”), Inteligencia y logos (1982; “Intelligence and Logos”), and Inteligencia y razón (1983; “Intelligence and Reason”).
Andrés Ortiz-Osés (1943-present)
Contemporary thinker often credited with introducing Spain to Jungian theory, with its exploration of dreams and the subconscious. Jungian theory relates to the Swiss psychologist Carl Jung and his works.
He studied theology in Comillas and Rome and then moved to The Institute of Philosophy in Innsbruck where he earned a Ph.D in hermeneutics. He is the author of more than thirty books and is the founder of the symbolic hermeneutics, a philosophical trend that gave a symbolic twist to north European hermeneutics.