Long relegated to the margins of Western philosophy, Spain in fact stood at almost every decisive turn — transmitting the ancient heritage, founding the law of nations at Salamanca, anticipating modern economics and scepticism.
Its exclusion owes less to any absence of thought than to the « black legend » and to a narrow definition of philosophy: Spain thought through the novel, the essay, mysticism and law rather than the abstract system.
From Vitoria to Unamuno, Ortega y Gasset, Zambrano and Adela Cortina, one thread runs throughout — a « vital reason » that ties thought to the flesh-and-bone human being, to circumstance and to responsibility.
Is there a Spanish philosophy?
In the great histories of Western philosophy, Spain occupies a paradoxical place. Present at almost every decisive stage in the intellectual formation of Europe, it nonetheless often remains relegated to the periphery of the narrative. The manuals devote long passages to French rationalism, German idealism, British empiricism or Italian political philosophy, but struggle to identify a comparable Spanish tradition. Spain sometimes seems to have produced only theologians, mystics, writers or moralists, as if it had experienced a particular difficulty in transforming its historical experience into philosophical systems recognised as such.
This representation, however, rests less on an absence of thought than on a problem of definition and visibility. Because it has often expressed itself in literary, spiritual, legal or pedagogical forms rather than in vast speculative constructions, Spanish philosophy has been partly excluded from the European intellectual canon. Yet it has never stood apart from the great debates of the continent. It transmitted the ancient heritage to the Middle Ages, took part in the renewal of natural law, questioned the conquest of the Americas, anticipated certain intuitions of rationalism and of modern economics, experimented with original forms of scepticism, and then, in the twentieth century, developed a philosophy centred on life, circumstance, exile and the fragility of human existence.
This history is all the more important in that it largely merges with the great geopolitical transformations of Spain: the construction of medieval Christendom, imperial expansion, the conquest and administration of America, the assertion of the modern state, the decline of Spanish power, European rivalries, the crisis of 1898, the civil war, republican exile, the Franco dictatorship, the democratic transition and integration into a now transatlantic Spanish-speaking intellectual community. Spanish philosophy is therefore not content to comment on the world, for it is born of the effort to think concrete historical situations, often marked by crisis, cultural plurality and the confrontation between different conceptions of man.
From Isidore of Seville (560-636) to Adela Cortina (born in 1947), from the School of Salamanca to the vital reason of José Ortega y Gasset (1883-1955), from the mysticism of Teresa of Ávila (1515-1582) to the materialism of Gustavo Bueno (1924-2016), one and the same question runs through this tradition: how to preserve the dignity and freedom of the human being in the face of the political, religious or intellectual systems that claim to enclose him within an abstract truth? Far from being an anomaly, Spanish philosophy might thus constitute one of the most original paths taken by European thought.
Autopsy of a well-crafted legend
The marginalisation of Spanish thought cannot be explained solely by the quality of its works or by their degree of systematicity, since it also results from a historiographical construction closely tied to European power relations. From the sixteenth century onwards, as the Hispanic monarchy established itself as one of the world’s leading powers, its political and religious adversaries elaborated a discourse designed to delegitimise its empire. England, the United Provinces and several Protestant territories of the Germanic world spread the image of a Spain dominated by Catholic fanaticism, colonial cruelty, inquisitorial intolerance and intellectual stagnation. Gallican France, and then the France of the Enlightenment, contributed in turn to this representation.
It is in this context that the « black legend » (leyenda negra) took hold, which does not reduce to a denunciation of the violence committed by Spain. It tends, indeed, to present that violence as the manifestation of a supposedly national essence incapable of modernity, freedom of conscience or scientific rationality. Spain would not merely have committed abuses: it would be, by nature, external to the movement of progress that was leading the rest of Europe towards science, industry and the Enlightenment.
This judgement reached its most famous expression in 1782 with the publication of the article « Spain » written by Nicolas Masson de Morvilliers (1740-1789) for the Encyclopédie méthodique. In it, the author formulated a question destined to become emblematic: « What do we owe to Spain? And for two centuries, for four, for ten, what has it done for Europe? » Behind the provocation lay a genuine civilisational condemnation, for Spain was described as a power that had received Europe’s benefits without contributing to its intellectual development.
Now, the article caused a considerable shock wave in the Iberian peninsula. The wound was all the deeper because eighteenth-century Spain was itself aware of its internal problems. The authorities lodged diplomatic complaints while intellectuals set about defending the country’s scientific, literary and philosophical achievements. In 1786, for example, Juan Pablo Forner (1756-1797) wrote his Oración apologética, a vast plea in favour of Spanish culture.
The controversy did not die out with the Age of Enlightenment. It carried on into the nineteenth century, when Spanish liberals began to seek in the national history the causes of the country’s political, industrial and scientific failings. The image imposed from outside was then partly internalised, and Spain no longer asked only how to answer foreign criticism: it questioned its own responsibility in its decline.
This anxiety gave birth to the polemic of Spanish science, which took on particular scope from 1876. The jurist Gumersindo de Azcárate (1840-1917) argued that freedom of research had been stifled for nearly three centuries by inquisitorial power and by the alliance between the monarchy and the Church. For him, the absence of a modern science comparable to that of the countries of northern Europe did not result from a national incapacity, but from political and religious structures unfavourable to freedom of thought.
Marcelino Menéndez Pelayo (1856-1912) answered him by undertaking a gigantic work of rehabilitation of the Spanish intellectual past. His texts, gathered under the title La Ciencia Española, sought to demonstrate that Spain had indeed produced philosophers, scholars, theologians, jurists and humanists of the first rank. Menéndez Pelayo valued in particular Spanish scholasticism, the Christian thinkers of the Golden Age (1492-1661) and the classical scientific traditions. He thus stood in frontal opposition to the liberal or positivist intellectuals, among them Manuel de la Revilla (1846-1881) and José del Perojo (1850-1908), who insisted rather on the negative effects of a supposed religious and political closure.
Moreover, the controversy went beyond philosophical circles. It touched historical studies, philology and the teaching of ancient languages. The Hellenist Enrique Soms y Castelín (1860-1913), supported by Menéndez Pelayo, translated major works by the German philologist Georg Curtius (1820-1885) in order to contribute to the reconstruction of a Spanish scientific culture. Translating the great European works then became a way of filling what some described as a « scientific desert », but also of proving that Spain could reconnect with international intellectual production.
This polemic in fact revealed a deeper difficulty: what deserves to be called « philosophy »? Since René Descartes (1596-1650), Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831), modern philosophy has tended to identify itself with the construction of abstract systems, ordered according to explicit conceptual principles. Now, Spanish thought has frequently expressed itself in hybrid genres: the theological treatise, the legal commentary, the essay, the dialogue, the novel, the theatre, poetry or the mystical narrative. It thus starts less readily from a disembodied thinking subject than from man confronted with a moral, political or historical situation.
This concrete and non-systematic character was long interpreted as a lack. A work such as that of Miguel de Cervantes (1547-1616) is then classified under literature; that of Teresa of Ávila, under spirituality; that of Francisco de Vitoria (1483-1546), under law; that of Baltasar Gracián (1601-1658), under morality; that of Miguel de Unamuno (1864-1936), under the essay. Disciplinary dispersion prevents us from perceiving the coherence of a tradition that seeks precisely to overcome the separation between thought, existence and action.
The « Spanish aphilosophical syndrome » thus appears as the product of a double misunderstanding. On the one hand, European geopolitical rivalries durably associated Spain with obscurantism. On the other, the dominant criteria of philosophical recognition privileged rationalist systems at the expense of literary, existential or practical forms. Spain therefore did not lack thought: it often thought in an intellectual language that the classic histories of philosophy did not know how to recognise.
From Seville to Salamanca: when Spain thought for all of Europe
Long before the modern era, the Iberian peninsula constituted a major space for the circulation of knowledge. Situated at the junction of the Christian, Muslim and Jewish worlds, it played an essential role in the transmission of ancient works and in the confrontation between the monotheistic traditions. This mediating function explains the richness of its medieval philosophy.
Isidore of Seville is one of its first central figures. His most famous work, the Etymologiæ, constitutes a vast encyclopaedia intended to preserve and organise the knowledge available at the end of Antiquity. The work brings together elements of grammar, rhetoric, dialectic, medicine, law, theology, cosmology and natural history. For centuries, it served as a reference for the whole of the Western Christian world.
Nonetheless, the importance of Isidore of Seville lies not only in the originality of his theses, since it resides above all in his capacity to transmit a heritage threatened with disappearance. In a politically fragmented Europe, his work offered an architecture of knowledge that enabled the medieval generations to maintain a link with classical culture. Spain thus appears, from the early Middle Ages, not as a periphery cut off from the European intellectual movement, but as one of its principal relays.
In the thirteenth century, Ramon Llull (1232-1315) tried to go further by conceiving a universal logical method. His Ars Magna rests on a combinatory system associating letters, concepts and geometrical figures. By turning circles or combining fundamental attributes, he sought to produce rational demonstrations capable of establishing the truths of the Christian faith.
It should be added that his project is inseparable from the religious plurality of the medieval Mediterranean. Ramon Llull wanted a common language enabling him to convince Muslims and Jews without relying solely on the authority of the Christian scriptures. His method therefore had to be universal, rational and independent of confessional particularities. Even though its aim remained apologetic, the idea of a formal system capable of producing logical combinations has sometimes been interpreted as a prefiguration of symbolic logic, or even of certain principles of computing.
The Iberian peninsula also played a fundamental role in the transmission of Arab and Jewish philosophies. The Dominican Ramon Martí (1220-1285), for example, mastered Arabic, Hebrew and Aramaic. In his Pugio Fidei, written in 1278, he drew on numerous Jewish and Muslim sources, notably the works of Averroes (1126-1198) and Maimonides (1138-1204). His translations and analyses helped to introduce into the Latin world texts still largely unknown to Christians.
Moreover, this circulation of knowledge fed directly into the great debates of Christian scholasticism. Ramon Martí’s works were used in particular by Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274), for they enabled him to incorporate arguments drawn from non-Christian traditions into his own reflection on faith, reason and the knowledge of God. Spanish influence on European theology therefore rests not only on the elaboration of original doctrines, but also on the bringing into relation of different intellectual worlds.
At the end of the Middle Ages, the Spanish universities became in their turn centres of theological production, and Alfonso Fernández de Madrigal (1400-1455), nicknamed « el Tostado », embodies this vitality. A theologian, commentator and reformer, he opposed concubinage among members of the clergy and took part in numerous learned controversies, while his positions gave rise to debates with the Dominican Juan de Torquemada (1388-1468). The Franciscans also intervened in the discussions surrounding the Immaculate Conception.
These controversies remind us that medieval philosophy did not constitute a uniform body of thought: the religious orders, the universities and the ecclesiastical authorities defended positions that were sometimes strongly divergent. Behind the seemingly abstract categories of theology, questions of authority, institutional reform, the conception of the human being and the organisation of the Christian community were ultimately at play.
Within this framework, Ramon Sibiuda (1385-1436) illustrates another attempt to articulate faith and reason. A professor of philosophy and medicine at Toulouse, he wrote in 1436 a Theologia Naturalis, also known under the title Liber Creaturarum. According to him, God offered men two books: the Bible and the « book of nature ». The first gives access to divine revelation through the sacred text, whereas the second can be read by human reason on the basis of the observation of creatures. Ramon Sibiuda therefore did not seek to oppose faith to experience, but to show that the rational study of nature can consolidate belief. His approach subsequently exerted a considerable influence, notably through Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592), who translated and commented on his work in his Apology for Raymond Sebond.
In the end, all these medieval Spanish thinkers share the same concern, namely that of establishing the conditions for communication between different forms of truth. They reflect on the relationship between revelation and reasoning, between Christianity and competing religions, between ancient knowledge and Christian culture. This mediating vocation prepared the extraordinary intellectual effervescence of sixteenth-century Spain.
Salamanca, capital of a new world
The discovery and then the conquest by Europeans of America, from 1492, radically overturned the political, legal and moral categories of Europe. Spain consequently found itself confronted with unprecedented problems: what rights did the Crown possess over the discovered territories? Were the indigenous peoples subjects, enemies, infidels or legitimate sovereigns? Could a war of conquest be just? Did evangelisation authorise coercion? How was one to regulate trade in an empire linking Europe, America and Asia?
The School of Salamanca was born of the necessity of answering these questions. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, its theologians renewed scholasticism by applying the principles of Thomism to the transformations of their age. However, their reflection was not limited to commenting on medieval texts, since it bore on the practical problems of a world in the process of globalisation.
In this context, Francisco de Vitoria is generally presented as one of the founders of modern international law. In his lectures De Indis and De Iure Belli, he examined the titles invoked by the Spanish monarchy to justify its domination over the American peoples and rejected the idea that the pope or the emperor Charles V (king of Spain from 1516 to 1556) possessed a universal authority allowing him to distribute the territories of the world.
For Francisco de Vitoria, the indigenous populations were composed of human beings endowed with reason and therefore possessed a legitimate sovereignty over their lands and communities. In short, neither the absence of Christianity among them nor certain practices deemed contrary to European morality sufficed to deprive them of their rights. The conquest could not, consequently, be justified by the mere religious or military superiority of Spain.
However, this thinker did not condemn all Spanish presence in America. He invoked the existence of a law of nations (ius gentium) founded on the natural sociability of humanity. Thus the Spanish would, according to him, have the right to travel, trade and communicate with the American peoples, on condition of causing them no harm. If these peaceful rights were violently prevented, certain forms of coercion might possibly be envisaged. His doctrine therefore retains ambiguities, but introduces a fundamental limit to imperial omnipotence.
Domingo de Soto (1494-1560) pursued this reflection on natural law, justice and moral responsibility. He also took part in the discussion on poverty, assistance and human freedom. Like Francisco de Vitoria, he held that political institutions must be evaluated by the yardstick of a moral order superior to the decisions of sovereigns.
Another representative of the School of Salamanca, Francisco Suárez (1548-1617), developed for his part a political theory in which power does not descend directly from God to the king. Indeed, authority belongs originally to the human community, constituted according to the principles of natural law, and it is only by a pact, explicit or implicit, that the collectivity transfers the exercise of power to a sovereign.
Such a conception opens the way to a contractual theory of sovereignty, since, if power was entrusted by the community, it is not the personal property of the monarch. The sovereign must consequently respect the ends for which his authority was granted to him. In certain extreme situations, resistance to tyranny may therefore be considered legitimate.
Francisco Suárez’s works circulated in Europe: his Disputationes Metaphysicæ became a reference manual for the teaching of metaphysics. They thus influenced thinkers as different as René Descartes and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716), and constitute an important link in the formation of modern ontology. Several centuries later, Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) himself acknowledged the historical role of this mediation.
The School of Salamanca also contributed to the emergence of economic thought. The influx of American precious metals caused, in the sixteenth century, a general rise in prices in Europe, and several Spanish theologians analysed this phenomenon by relating the value of money to its quantity in circulation. They also examined the formation of prices, the legitimacy of profit, lending, interest and, finally, contractual freedom.
Luis de Molina (1535-1600) defended in particular a relatively flexible conception of the market. According to him, the just price cannot always be fixed abstractly by a political authority, for it also results from the subjective utility of goods, from their scarcity and from the agreement between the actors in the exchange. This approach set him against those who, like Domingo de Soto, gave more room to public regulation.
For his part, Tomás de Mercado (1523-1575) was also interested in the commercial practices of an empire now structured by transatlantic flows. Scholastic reflection thus moved from the monastery or the lecture hall towards the ports, the fairs, the markets and the financial circuits, while Christian morality had to learn to think through increasingly complex economic operations.
Let us note that this analysis does not amount to a pure and simple defence of unregulated capitalism. It must indeed be said that the theologians sought above all to determine the conditions of a just exchange, and thus condemned forms of enrichment founded on deception, exploitation or the abuse of necessity. Nonetheless, by recognising the role of scarcity, information and subjective evaluation, they anticipated certain later reflections on the functioning of markets.
Probabilism constitutes another major contribution of the second Spanish scholasticism. Bartolomé de Medina (1527-1581), for example, held that, when a moral question remains uncertain, the individual may follow a reasonably probable opinion favourable to his freedom, even if the contrary opinion appears more probable. This doctrine sought to prevent a theoretical uncertainty from automatically leading to the imposition of the most constraining solution.
Gabriel Vázquez (1549-1604) and Francisco Suárez were among those who formalised such a current. Now, probabilism had a considerable influence in Catholic moral theology, for it also gave rise to numerous debates, its adversaries reproaching it with facilitating accommodations with the rule. It bears witness, however, to a will to acknowledge the complexity of situations and the impossibility of applying general principles mechanically to each particular case.
Towards the end of the seventeenth century, the School of Salamanca gradually entered a phase of decline. The third volume of the Cursus Theologiæ Moralis, published by the Discalced Carmelites in 1670, may symbolically mark the end of its most creative period. Scholasticism then tended to become more repetitive and more dogmatic, while the centres of scientific innovation shifted towards other regions of Europe.
It would nonetheless be reductive to see in this school only a theological relic: it thought through the sovereignty of peoples, the moral limits of war, the rights of conquered populations, the political contract, international circulation, money and the formation of prices. In other words, it furnished part of the conceptual vocabulary needed to understand the first age of globalisation.
From the conquistadors to the law of peoples: the troubled conscience of the Empire
The geopolitical importance of the School of Salamanca lies in the fact that it developed within the very imperial power whose practices it questioned. Its thinkers were not observers external to Spanish expansion: they taught in the institutions of the kingdom, sometimes advised the authorities and belonged to religious orders linked to the missionary enterprise. Their critique was therefore internal.
This position explains the limits, but also the reach, of their reflection. They did not necessarily reject the Spanish imperial project, but rather sought to subject its exercise to universal norms. In their eyes, military power did not suffice to create law, the difference of religion did not abolish sovereignty, political authority had to be justified and war could be legitimate only under certain conditions.
These principles took on particular importance in the debate on the status of the Amerindians, since to recognise their rationality amounts to rejecting the idea that they were beings naturally destined for servitude. Colonial domination then had to be justified by something other than a supposed ontological inferiority. Even when the arguments advanced remained compatible with certain forms of intervention, the framework of the debate had changed: non-European peoples became subjects of law.
This transformation obviously suppressed neither the violence of the conquest nor colonial exploitation. It shows, however, that the Spanish Empire produced within itself a critical reflection on its own foundations. The opposition between a humanist northern Europe and a unanimously fanatical Spain thus appears too simplistic, and this for a crucial reason: the first great controversies on the rights of colonised peoples unfolded at the very heart of the Hispanic monarchy.
The international influence of this thought proved considerable. Later, the Dutchman Hugo Grotius (1583-1645), the German Samuel von Pufendorf (1632-1694) and the Englishman John Locke (1632-1704) took up, transformed and secularised several concepts drawn from the second Spanish scholasticism. The law of nations gradually became international law; popular sovereignty and contractualism were integrated into the great modern political doctrines; and the economic reflections of Salamanca were, much later, brought closer to certain principles of the Austrian School of economics.
The philosophy that came from the other side of the Pyrenees thus appears as a thought of the universal elaborated on the basis of a concrete geopolitical situation. It starts not from an abstract humanity, but from the violent encounter between peoples, religions and sovereignties. Its modernity is born precisely of this confrontation.
Mystics, physicians and sceptics: the other faces of the Golden Age
Spanish thought of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries does not, however, reduce to the second scholasticism. Alongside the university and natural law, there developed mystical, rationalist, medical and sceptical currents that bear witness to a remarkable intellectual diversity.
By way of example, Ignatius of Loyola (1491-1556) elaborated in his Spiritual Exercises a highly structured method of introspection: the believer is invited to examine his thoughts, his emotions, his desires and his decisions in order to discern the inner movements that draw him away from, or closer to, God. Religious experience no longer reduces to a mere doctrinal adherence and thus becomes a daily work on the conscience.
This inner discipline may be interpreted as a form of practical subjectivism, for the subject learns to observe his own mind, to distinguish his motivations and to order his will. Without directly anticipating the Cartesian cogito, the Spiritual Exercises show, consequently, that self-consciousness already occupies a central place in certain Iberian spiritual traditions.
Spanish mysticism also reached an exceptional expression in Fray Luis de León (1528-1591), Teresa of Ávila and John of the Cross (1542-1591). Their writing seeks to give an account of an experience that exceeds the ordinary categories of language. The recourse to poetry, to the amorous metaphor or to the autobiographical narrative should not be regarded as the abandonment of conceptual thought: it constitutes, on the contrary, an attempt to explore dimensions of existence that abstract argumentation struggles to grasp.
This tradition exerts a lasting influence on the Spanish conception of philosophy, for which truth is not only a proposition capable of being demonstrated: it is also an experience, a transformation of the subject, a way of living. This priority accorded to concrete existence reappears afterwards, in secularised forms, in Miguel de Unamuno, José Ortega y Gasset or again María Zambrano (1904-1991).
For his part, the physician Gómez Pereira (1500-1567) developed a very different approach. In his Antoniana Margarita, published in 1554, he addressed questions of medicine, physics and metaphysics. He defended in particular a theory of the animal-machine: animals would not possess a consciousness comparable to that of the human being, and their behaviour could be explained by bodily mechanisms. Now, this thesis precedes by several decades the Cartesian formulations on the automatism of beasts. Gómez Pereira also proposed a reasoning founded on self-consciousness: « I know that I know something, and whoever knows exists, therefore I exist. » The proximity to René Descartes’s cogito is striking, even if the two doctrines do not coincide and the question of a direct influence remains distinct from that of a conceptual anticipation.
Francisco Sánchez (1551-1623) took, for his part, another path. In Quod nihil scitur, published in 1581, he attacked the dogmatism of the Aristotelian tradition. The title (which means « That nothing is known » in Latin) might suggest an absolute scepticism, but the author sought less to renounce knowledge than to reconstruct it on more prudent foundations. He thus refused the demonstrations that claim to deduce the workings of the world from abstract categories, for, in his view, knowledge must rest on observation, experience and the critical examination of phenomena. This scepticism is therefore constructive: it destroys artificial certainties in order to make possible a more rigorous inquiry into nature.
All these advances show that Golden Age Spain is not intellectually foreign to the transformations that led to modern science in Europe. It indeed harbours debates on consciousness, animal automatism, experience, method and the limits of knowledge. If these contributions were less integrated into the great European narrative than those of Francis Bacon (1561-1626) or René Descartes, they nonetheless partake of the same epistemological upheaval.
Disenchantment, that reason of state of the Spanish soul
The Spanish seventeenth century is, for its part, marked by desengaño, a word that may be translated as « disillusion » or « disenchantment » (in the sense of « coming out of error, revelation of the truth »). It is not merely a literary theme, for desengaño translates a historical experience: that of an immense monarchy whose power was becoming fragile; of a society obsessed with appearance, honour and hierarchy; and of a Christian world crossed by wars, dynastic crises and confessional conflicts.
Miguel de Cervantes gives this sensibility one of its most universal expressions. Don Quixote tries to impose on the world the idealised values of the romances of chivalry, and his adventure proves both comic and tragic, for reality constantly belies his interpretations. Yet his madness also reveals the moral poverty of a world that has renounced every ideal.
The philosophy of Miguel de Cervantes is born precisely of this tension: the human being lives in narratives, beliefs and representations that give meaning to his existence, but constantly comes up against the resistance of the real. Wisdom therefore consists neither in surrendering entirely to illusion nor in reducing life to a cynical realism. On the contrary, it requires inhabiting the contradiction between the ideal and the circumstance.
The playwright Pedro Calderón de la Barca (1600-1681) deepened this questioning in his most famous play, Life Is a Dream. Indeed, if existence is comparable to a dream or a theatrical representation, how is one to distinguish truth from appearance? The answer lies not so much in an absolute metaphysical certainty as in moral action. Thus, even if the world is unstable or illusory, the individual must act justly, for uncertainty about the nature of reality does not exempt one from responsibility.
Baltasar Gracián, for his part, describes life as a pilgrimage strewn with traps, and his work insists on prudence, discernment, self-mastery and the understanding of power relations. Man must consequently learn to read the intentions of others and to protect himself in a social universe where appearance often conceals interests.
This moral psychology founded on desengaño enjoys a lasting posterity in the rest of Europe: the German Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) translated Baltasar Gracián, while his compatriot Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) also found in his analyses of the will, of dissimulation and of social confrontation elements liable to feed his own critique of Western morality.
However, desengaño also possesses a political dimension, given that Spanish thinkers were confronted with the diffusion of the ideas of Machiavelli (1469-1527), whose doctrine seemed to them to separate political efficacy from Christian morality. To meet this challenge, some turned to the Latin author Tacitus (58-120) and developed the current known as « Tacitism », within which the aim was to think a razón de Estado, a reason of state compatible with religious requirements. Indeed, in their eyes, the question was formidable: how to govern effectively in a world dominated by the rivalry of powers without renouncing all morality? The answers remained diverse and sometimes ambiguous, but bear witness to an effort not to abandon politics to pure cynicism.
This « Tacitism » is represented, for example, by Baltasar Álamos de Barrientos (1555-1640), Diego de Saavedra Fajardo (1584-1648) and Francisco de Quevedo (1580-1645), who acknowledge Machiavelli’s contribution (politics is necessarily realistic and pragmatic) while refusing absolute cynicism. Their aim was thus to go beyond the simple idea that the end justifies the means and to link reason of state and Christian morality. They also inherited from Tacitus their taste for brevity and the aphorism.
Baroque pessimism is therefore not a simple national melancholy: it constitutes a method of knowledge. Disenchantment makes it possible to unveil individual and collective illusions, to understand the fragility of institutions and to question the conditions of moral action in an uncertain world. This tragic consciousness thus becomes one of the deepest constants of Spanish thought.
The Enlightenment under surveillance: reforming without breaking
At the end of the seventeenth century and the beginning of the eighteenth, a group of thinkers known as the novatores set out to introduce European scientific innovations into Spain. Between 1680 and 1720, they took an interest in atomism, Cartesianism and Newtonian physics. Their aim was to break with a scholasticism that had become repetitive without necessarily calling the Catholic faith into question.
This attempt nonetheless aroused strong resistance. The Thomist theologian Francisco Polanco (1657-1720) published a Dialogus Physico-Theologicus contra Philosophiæ Novatores to defend orthodoxy against the new theories of matter and motion. Scientific debates thus remained closely tied to the religious question: to adopt a new conception of nature could appear as a threat to the whole doctrinal order.
Now, the Spanish Enlightenment developed in this particular context and therefore did not generally take the form of a frontal clash with Catholicism comparable to that observed among certain French philosophers. It sought rather to reconcile intellectual reform, enlightened monarchy and religious continuity, which is why it is often described as a « Catholic Enlightenment ».
Benito Jerónimo Feijoo (1676-1764) is probably its most famous figure. In his monumental Teatro crítico universal, published between 1726 and 1740, he attacked superstitions, unfounded beliefs and popular errors, helping to spread the principles of the experimental method in medicine and physics.
This thinker essentially sought to teach his readers to distinguish facts from rumours and observations from prejudices, and his work represents a considerable effort of scientific popularisation. It nonetheless presents limits, as when he addressed certain dogmas or certain pious traditions, notably the belief in the coming of Saint James to Spain, his critique then becoming more cautious.
Gregorio Mayans (1699-1781) defended, for his part, a thoroughgoing reform of philosophy and the humanities. He drew in particular on John Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding in his Filosofía Cristiana, demonstrating a will to integrate modern empiricism into a Christian reflection, which nonetheless came up against ecclesiastical censorship. This tension sums up the dilemma of the Spanish Enlightenment, since the aim for this group of philosophers was to modernise methods, teaching and administration without provoking a political or religious rupture. Philosophy became inseparable from a programme of state reform.
Under the reign of Charles III (1759-1788), Pedro Rodríguez de Campomanes (1723-1802) supported, for his part, the development of the Societies of Friends of the Country. Such bodies were placed under public supervision in order to encourage agriculture, manufacturing, education and the diffusion of useful knowledge. Enlightened thought thus translated into concrete institutions intended to improve the kingdom’s productivity and prosperity.
Scientific expeditions partook of the same movement. Félix de Azara (1742-1821) carried out important work in the Río de la Plata region (present-day Argentina and Uruguay), while the expedition led by Francisco Javier Balmis (1753-1819) between 1803 and 1806 organised the diffusion of smallpox vaccination throughout the Spanish Empire. Such a transoceanic public-health enterprise illustrates the Spanish monarchy’s capacity to mobilise science in the service of a public-health objective.
Consequently, as we discussed in greater detail in an article published by Conflits, the Spain of the Enlightenment cannot be reduced to immobility. It experimented with specific forms of modernisation, more cautious and more state-driven, admittedly, than those observed in other countries. However, the difficulty of durably guaranteeing intellectual freedom limited the depth of the transformations. This contradiction in fact prepared the nineteenth-century clashes between conservative Catholicism, liberalism and educational reform.
Krause rather than Kant: Germany to Spain’s rescue
In the nineteenth century, Spain faced a succession of political crises: the Napoleonic invasion, the War of Independence, the confrontation between absolutism and liberalism, the Carlist wars, changes of regime, revolutions and restorations. In this context of instability, philosophy became an instrument of national regeneration.
Now, Krausism played a central role in this undertaking. It owes its name to the German philosopher Karl Christian Friedrich Krause (1781-1832), whose work was less influential in Germany than in the Iberian peninsula. Julián Sanz del Río (1814-1869) discovered his thought during a period of study across the Rhine and introduced it into Spain.
The choice of Karl Christian Friedrich Krause rather than Immanuel Kant or Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel was not trivial. His philosophy proposed a « rational harmonism » capable of reconciling the individual and society, science and religion, freedom and the moral order. In a Spain divided between Catholic traditionalism and liberal radicalism, this search for synthesis appeared particularly attractive.
Julián Sanz del Río obtained in 1854 the chair of history and philosophy at the Central University of Madrid. At the opening of the academic year 1857-1858, he delivered an address calling on Spain to open itself more to the European scientific currents: the modernisation of the country would come, in his view, through a transformation of teaching and through the formation of individuals capable of freely exercising their judgement.
Krausism did not, however, remain confined to the university, since it became a project of social, moral and pedagogical reform. Its supporters wanted to form a « new man » endowed with an autonomous conscience, a scientific culture and a lofty sense of responsibility. In such a context, education had to develop all the dimensions of the person rather than mechanically transmit dogmas.
This ambition nonetheless came up against the hostility of conservative and neo-Thomist Catholic sectors. In 1875, several liberal professors were temporarily dismissed, which reflected the will, on the part of the state and the Church, to re-establish a stricter control over higher education.
Francisco Giner de los Ríos (1839-1915) then responded to this offensive by founding in 1876 the Free Institution of Education (Institución Libre de Enseñanza, ILE), a private and secular establishment resting on academic freedom. The ILE refused to allow teaching to be subordinated to an official political or religious doctrine. Its pedagogy valued, on the contrary, observation, experience, excursions, contact with nature, artistic practices and the development of critical thinking. It also defended a less authoritarian relationship between teachers and pupils, for the aim was not only to accumulate knowledge, but to form free citizens.
The influence of the ILE on Spanish culture is absolutely considerable. It contributed to the country’s scientific modernisation and to the formation of several generations of intellectuals. The writer Benito Pérez Galdós (1843-1920), for example, transposed into his novels a social critique close to the Krausist ideal by denouncing the hypocrisies, inequalities and blockages of Spanish society.
The influence of this current, moreover, went beyond the Iberian peninsula. José Rizal (1861-1896), the future hero of Philippine independence, studied from 1882 at the Central University of Madrid and came into contact with the ideas of Francisco Giner de los Ríos. Spanish Krausism thus took part, indirectly, in the political and intellectual formation of figures critical of the Spanish colonial order.
This circulation reveals, in any case, a remarkable historical reversal. Spain, which had long received from its possessions resources and subjects, also became a place where colonial intellectuals discovered the concepts liable to nourish their emancipation. The philosophy of academic freedom consequently came into contradiction with the imperial structures of the country that spread it.
1898: losing an empire, recovering a question
The military defeat of 1898 against the United States of America and the ensuing loss of Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines caused a national trauma across the Pyrenees. Spain ceased to be a great colonial power and became brutally aware of its decline. This crisis was not confined to the military or political institutions: it opened an interrogation on the very identity of the country.
The so-called « Generation of 1898 » thus sought to understand the causes of what it saw as a Spanish decadence. It questioned the relationship between tradition and modernity, Europe and Spain, religion and science, the people and the elites. Philosophy then left the lecture halls alone to invest the essay, the novel and the press.
Miguel de Unamuno perfectly embodies this transformation: he refused the abstract systems that claim to resolve human contradictions by logic alone. His starting point is « the man of flesh and bone », the concrete individual who suffers, hopes, loves and knows that he must die.
In The Tragic Sense of Life in Men and Nations, published in 1912, the author describes the human condition as an insoluble conflict. Reason teaches that the individual is mortal and that no certain proof guarantees immortality. Desire, however, refuses annihilation, and the human being wants to persist, to preserve his consciousness and not to disappear.
Faith does not suppress this conflict: it is born of it. Miguel de Unamuno thus presents belief not as a tranquil certainty, but as a struggle, an agony in the etymological sense of the term. The spiritual life is a combat between the need for eternity and rational doubt.
This conception gives birth to a profoundly original Christian existentialism in which truth is not separated from the anguish of the one who seeks it. A doctrine that does not answer the fear of dying or the need to give meaning to existence remains, in his view, insufficient, even if it is logically coherent.
Miguel de Unamuno also forged the concept of intrahistoria. Where official history recounts wars, reigns, revolutions and the decisions of rulers, intrahistory designates for him the silent life of the millions of anonymous individuals who work, raise their children and maintain the continuity of society. This is why, beneath the agitation of visible events lies a deeper and slower reality. This notion constitutes at the same time a critique of heroic history, for a nation cannot be reduced to its conquests or its catastrophes; it rests in fact on the daily practices of a population often absent from the official narratives. The true Spain is therefore to be found not only in the great battles or the institutions, but also (and perhaps above all) in the ordinary existence of its people.
Miguel de Unamuno’s « Quixotism » prolongs this perspective: in his work, Don Quixote becomes the symbol of a fidelity to the ideal against utilitarian calculation. Faced with a Europe perceived as rationalist, scientific and materialist, Spain could bring another form of wisdom, founded this time on passion, risk and the refusal to reduce life to efficiency. This valorisation absolutely does not mean that he rejects all modernisation: it expresses rather his mistrust of a conception of Europe that would identify progress with technical power alone. In short, after the imperial catastrophe of 1898, Miguel de Unamuno sought less to restore past greatness than to discover a new spiritual mission.
Ortega y Gasset: saving Spain through circumstance
José Ortega y Gasset belongs to a different generation. Trained in Germany, he was familiar with phenomenology, historicism and the European philosophical debates of his time. His ambition consisted rather in reinserting Spain into intellectual modernity without effacing its singularity.
His most famous formula, « I am myself and my circumstance, and if I do not save it, I do not save myself », sums up the heart of his philosophy. From his point of view, the individual never exists in isolation: he is always situated in an epoch, a society, a body, a set of relations and problems. Circumstance is therefore not an external backdrop, but an integral part of his being. José Ortega y Gasset thus refused the abstract subject of certain rationalist philosophies. For him, consciousness is not a substance enclosed within itself; it is a life engaged in a world. To think consists, in the end, in responding to the difficulties that circumstance imposes.
This conception leads to « ratiovitalism », which posits that reason must not be rejected, but replaced within life. « Pure reason » often claims to contemplate the real from a universal and timeless point of view, whereas « vital reason » recognises, on the contrary, that all reasoning proceeds from a concrete existence.
This thinker also developed a form of perspectivism, according to which each individual perceives reality from a particular position. No perspective exhausts the world, but not all are therefore arbitrary. Truth results, in the end, from the progressive integration of multiple points of view.
Perspectivism therefore does not mean that each person would possess his own truth without the possibility of dialogue. It affirms, on the contrary, that access to the real is always situated and that knowledge progresses through the confrontation of perspectives. Now, this doctrine corresponds profoundly to the history of a Spain crossed by regional identities, political fractures and different social experiences.
In The Revolt of the Masses, an essay published in 1929, José Ortega y Gasset analyses, moreover, the transformations of European society. The « mass-man » is defined principally not by his social class, but by his attitude, given that he takes the benefits of modern civilisation for granted without recognising the efforts, the disciplines and the institutions that made them possible. Democracy and technology enabled a growing number of individuals to attain conditions of life previously reserved for minorities, and the philosopher does not condemn this extension. He is concerned, however, by the rise of a human type that claims rights without accepting limits or responsibilities.
His diagnosis possesses a political dimension: modern societies risk being dominated by impatient majorities, hostile to excellence and easily mobilised by authoritarian movements. José Ortega y Gasset’s analysis is set within the interwar period, an era marked by the rise of fascism, Soviet communism and mass nationalisms.
Around him was constituted what would later be called the School of Madrid, which brought together thinkers who did not form a homogeneous doctrine but shared an interest in phenomenology, history, life and the crisis of Western reason. This school represents one of the most brilliant moments of what may be called the « Spanish Silver Age » (the 1890s to the 1930s).
María Zambrano, or reason that begins to dream
María Zambrano is at once the heir and the critic of José Ortega y Gasset. She belongs to the so-called « Generation of 1936 » and experienced exile after the Francoist victory at the end of the civil war (1936-1939). Her work seeks above all to overcome the limits of a Western tradition that would have gradually identified truth with the rational domination of the real.
María Zambrano no more rejects reason than her master did. She holds, however, that the philosophical logos, when it becomes exclusively analytical and conceptual, leaves in shadow an essential part of the human being. Dream, memory, the sacred, suffering and poetic creation cannot, indeed, be entirely translated into the language of demonstration.
She then elaborated the concept of « poetic reason », which consists not in replacing philosophy with literature, but in inventing a form of knowledge capable of respecting what reveals itself gradually, indirectly or symbolically. Poetry possesses no less truth than the concept; it accedes to different dimensions of experience.
This approach prolongs an ancient constant of Spanish thought, since the mystics of the Golden Age had already used poetry to describe union with the divine. Miguel de Cervantes and Pedro Calderón de la Barca had, for their part, questioned reality through theatrical or novelistic fiction. As for Miguel de Unamuno, he had made the essay and the narrative the privileged forms of an existential philosophy.
In María Zambrano, this tradition becomes an explicit critique of Western reason. Thought must no longer really conquer its object as an army occupies a territory, but must sometimes wait, listen and welcome. True knowledge therefore implies an inner transformation of the subject.
Exile reinforced this orientation. Deprived of her homeland, the philosopher explored the links between identity, memory and uprooting. In her eyes, Spain was no longer only a national territory; it became an inner presence, painful and fragmented, that writing tried to save from oblivion.
Her philosophy thus opens an original path between phenomenology, poetry and political meditation. It shows that the historical crisis cannot be understood solely through the analysis of institutions and also reaches dreams, memories and the intimate forms of existence.
When Spanish philosophy changes continent
The civil war caused one of the greatest ruptures in Spanish intellectual history. Francisco Franco’s victory forced a considerable part of the academics, writers, scientists and philosophers linked to the Second Republic (1931-1939) to leave the country. Many of them then found refuge in Latin America, notably in Mexico.
This exile represented a catastrophe for Spain, which lost part of its intellectual elite. It became, however, a founding moment for contemporary Latin American philosophy, the exiles bringing with them a deep knowledge of the European traditions, translation skills and a pedagogical experience that transformed the university institutions of the host countries.
José Gaos (1900-1969) forged in this framework the concept of transtierro, a word that seeks to distinguish his experience from that of a mere forced departure. Spanish thinkers were not entirely transplanted into a foreign world, for they found again in America a language and part of their cultural heritage. They passed from one land to another without losing all continuity. Transtierro obviously suppresses neither the pain of separation nor the political loss. It expresses, however, the possibility of a re-rooting. In the end, Mexico did not constitute merely a provisional refuge; it became a space of philosophical creation.
José Gaos developed, moreover, a radical historicism: all philosophy is, according to him, tied to the personal and historical situation of its author. He consequently cast doubt on the possibility of a wholly objective and universal philosophical truth. Thought becomes in part a « monologue in solitude », the expression of a singular vocation and perspective.
Let us add that his work as a translator is immense, since he helped to make accessible in Spanish major works of European philosophy, notably texts by Aristotle (384-322 BC) and the Paideia of Werner Jaeger (1888-1961). Translation was for him not a secondary activity: it made it possible, on the contrary, to build a Spanish-language philosophical vocabulary common to both shores of the Atlantic Ocean.
For his part, the Spanish thinker Eduardo Nicol (1907-1990) opposed on several points the subjectivism of José Gaos. He developed a metaphysics of expression in which the human being is revealed fundamentally through language and through the relation to others: the logos is not solitary, but dialogical. For this thinker, truth cannot be reduced to the individual perspective, for it is born in a community of inquiry where the interlocutors confront their reasons. Human understanding is thus intrinsically intersubjective, and to think is already to address someone. This conception possesses an undeniably moral and political dimension, given that science is not, in his view, merely a set of results. It rests on an ethos, that is, a vocation to seek truth within a common framework. The destruction of dialogue therefore threatens both philosophy and civic life.
Let us also mention Wenceslao Roces (1897-1992), who played an essential role in the diffusion of German philosophy and of Marxism within the Spanish-speaking world. He translated into Spanish, notably, Karl Marx’s Capital and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s Lectures on the History of Philosophy. His work thus enabled several generations of Spanish-speaking readers to access these works directly.
Finally, Joaquín Xirau (1895-1946) developed for his part a reflection on phenomenology and education. He also took part in the translation of the first volumes of Jaeger’s Paideia. His work prolongs, in short, the pedagogical ideal of the Krausist and republican tradition.
Exile therefore transformed the space of Spanish philosophy, for the latter no longer coincided with the borders of the Spanish state: it became a transatlantic network linking Madrid, Mexico City, Buenos Aires and other university centres of Latin America.
Now, this transplantation produced a lasting effect, since the exiles helped to professionalise the teaching of philosophy, to found journals, to translate the great European texts and to train Latin American researchers. The political catastrophe of 1939 paradoxically gave birth to a broader Spanish-speaking intellectual community.
Under Franco, Thomism in uniform
While the exiles renewed philosophy in Latin America, Francoist Spain imposed a tightly controlled intellectual framework. The caudillo’s regime (1939-1975) rested on national-Catholicism and favoured an official neo-Thomism. The university was purged, republican professors were excluded and the curricula were subjected to strong ideological surveillance.
Thomism, which had once enabled the thinkers of Salamanca to confront new problems, then tended to become an instrument of legitimation. It furnished the regime with a vocabulary of the natural order, of authority and of religious unity. Official philosophy thereby valued the Catholic continuity of Spain against liberalism, Marxism and doctrines deemed foreign.
This situation does not mean that all intellectual creation disappeared, far from it. Thinkers pursued their research within the limits imposed by the regime or developed critical works at the margins of the dominant institutions. However, the rupture with the Silver Age and the exile of a large part of the elites weighed durably on university life.
From the end of the 1970s, the democratic transition (1975-1982) allowed a reopening. The universities reconnected with the international philosophical traditions, while Marxism, analytic philosophy, phenomenology, the ethics of discussion, the philosophy of science and contemporary political theories could be studied more freely. This renaissance did not, however, lead to the formation of a single school and favoured, on the contrary, a great diversification. Two figures particularly illustrate this new Spanish scene: Gustavo Bueno and Adela Cortina.
Gustavo Bueno and the materialisation of myths
Gustavo Bueno built one of the most ambitious Spanish philosophical systems of the twentieth century. His « philosophical materialism » refuses in this context both spiritualism and the simplistic forms of monist materialism. For him, reality does not reduce to a single, homogeneous substance, but is composed of levels, relations and structures irreducible to one another. His materialism is therefore pluralist and seeks to think the complexity of the sciences, institutions and human practices without invoking a soul, a world-spirit or a mysterious essence of culture.
An important part of his work thus consists in analysing scientific categories. The sciences do not, in his eyes, form a single body of knowledge progressing in a uniform manner, and each constructs its own field of objects, its methods and its criteria of truth. Philosophy must examine the relations between these disciplines without merging with them.
In El mito de la cultura, a major work published in 1996, Gustavo Bueno criticises the use of the word « culture » as if it designated a sacred, harmonious and incontestable reality. Contemporary societies indeed tend to invoke culture to justify identities, policies or institutions without analysing the material conflicts that constitute them.
This deconstruction also extends to contemporary political mythologies, since the author refuses the vague concepts that claim to explain society while concealing their presuppositions. His thought is polemical, systematic and strongly attached to conceptual distinction.
In this respect, he seems to break with the image of an essentially literary or existential Spanish philosophy. Yet he prolongs an important dimension of it: the will to subject collective representations to the test of critical disenchantment. His materialism constitutes a contemporary form of desengaño.
Adela Cortina, from « cordial reason » to « fear of the poor »
Adela Cortina, professor of ethics at the University of Valencia, develops for her part a philosophy turned towards the concrete conditions of democratic coexistence. She draws on personalism and on the ethics of discussion elaborated by the Germans Jürgen Habermas (1929-2026) and Karl-Otto Apel (1922-2017).
One of her most important distinctions opposes minimal ethics to maximal ethics. In this context, pluralist societies bring together individuals who do not share the same religion, the same conception of happiness or the same idea of the good life, and it would consequently be dangerous for the state to impose a complete model of existence. Minimal ethics designates the set of principles of justice indispensable to such a coexistence, namely respect for dignity, the recognition of rights, the refusal of arbitrary violence and the possibility of participating in public dialogue. These principles can be required of all.
Maximal ethics, by contrast, refers to the personal or collective projects of happiness. A religion, a philosophy or a tradition may propose a way of leading a fulfilled life, but it cannot impose it on those who do not share it. Democracy must therefore articulate common minima and a plurality of maxima.
Adela Cortina completes this approach with the idea of « cordial reason », according to which moral dialogue does not rest solely on abstract arguments. Indeed, it also presupposes the capacity to recognise the other as a vulnerable being worthy of consideration. Reason must be associated with a moral sensibility.
Her best-known concept in this vein is that of « aporophobia ». Forged from the Greek áporos, which designates the one who is without resources, the term refers to the rejection of the poor. Adela Cortina distinguishes this phenomenon from xenophobia or racism: a society may welcome favourably a wealthy foreigner, an investor, a tourist or a prestigious figure while rejecting a migrant without resources. What provokes hostility is then not principally the foreign origin, but the person’s supposed incapacity to take part in an advantageous relationship of exchange.
Aporophobia reveals the limits of a society organised around interested reciprocity. Individuals are more readily disposed to cooperate with those from whom they hope to receive something, whereas those who appear able to offer nothing are regarded as a burden.
Adela Cortina links this attitude to certain biological mechanisms of preference and self-interest, but refuses to make it a fatality. In her view, moral education can develop the active respect of human dignity, rational compassion and the capacity to recognise the value of a person independently of their wealth.
This reflection possesses an obvious geopolitical scope amid the debate on migratory flows, asylum, poverty and exclusion, notions that cannot be understood solely on the basis of national or cultural identities, since they are also structured around the economic value attributed to individuals.
Adela Cortina’s ethics thus rediscovers a constant of Spanish philosophy: to start from a concrete situation of vulnerability in order to question the universal claim of moral principles. Like Francisco de Vitoria before the Amerindian peoples, she asks who is recognised as a subject of dignity; like the probabilists of Salamanca, she refuses a purely mechanical morality; like José Ortega y Gasset, she inscribes reason within life and circumstance.
The augmented body, reason surpassed?
Contemporary debates on transhumanism prolong this interrogation on the limits of the human being. The Spanish philosopher Antonio Diéguez (born in 1961) has established himself in this framework as one of the leading Spanish-speaking specialists in these questions, with Transhumanismo, published in 2017, and Cuerpos inadecuados, which appeared in 2021.
Transhumanism defends the use of the sciences and technologies to improve the physical, cognitive or psychological capacities of the human being. Biotechnologies, artificial intelligence, genetics or brain-machine interfaces could indeed make it possible to prolong life, reduce suffering and increase certain performances. These prospects nonetheless pose major philosophical problems. Is a technically possible improvement always desirable? Who will have access to augmentation technologies? Do they risk reinforcing inequalities? From what point does the transformation of the body modify personal identity?
Antonio Diéguez examines these promises without reducing them to a utopia or an absolute threat. The central question becomes for him that of the criteria that make it possible to distinguish care, improvement and the radical transformation of the human. The philosophy of science here rediscovers its political function, that is, to evaluate the social uses of innovation.
This debate confirms the persistence of a concrete anthropocentrism in Spanish thought, for, even when it addresses futuristic technologies, it returns to embodied existence, to the vulnerability of bodies and to the material conditions of freedom.
A philosophy without borders: Spain in the great commerce of ideas
The history of Spanish philosophy cannot, however, be described as the isolated development of a pure national genius. It results from constant circulations between the Iberian peninsula, the rest of Europe, the Mediterranean and America.
Aristotelianism and Thomism furnished, for example, the logical framework of the second scholasticism, but these traditions reached Spain through Arab, Jewish or Christian translations and commentaries. The mediating role played by the Iberian peninsula therefore prevents us from reducing its philosophical identity to an exclusively national tradition.
Likewise, in the sixteenth century, the thought of Erasmus (1466-1536) exerted a considerable influence on the Spanish humanists, notably Juan Luis Vives (1492-1540). The critique of religious abuses, the attention paid to education and the return to the texts nourished in him a humanist Christianity sometimes suspect in the eyes of orthodoxy.
In the eighteenth century, the empiricism of John Locke fed, for its part, the renewal attempts of Gregorio Mayans. In the nineteenth century, the idealism of Karl Christian Friedrich Krause was adapted to the specific needs of a Spain in search of educational reform. Spanish Krausism therefore did not constitute a mere copy of German philosophy: it transformed it into a political and pedagogical programme.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, José Ortega y Gasset and his disciples received the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl (1859-1938) and Max Scheler (1874-1928), the vitalism of Henri Bergson (1859-1941), German historicism and the critique of Friedrich Nietzsche. These influences converged in a philosophy of vital reason that reduces to none of them.
The ontology of Martin Heidegger was in turn translated and interpreted by the intellectuals of the exile. Thanks to the work of the transterrados dear to José Gaos, the German philosophical debates circulated towards the whole of the Spanish-speaking world.
However, the movement did not go only from Europe towards Spain. Spanish philosophy also exerted a profound influence, as attested by the Pugio Fidei of Ramon Martí, which influenced the theology of Thomas Aquinas and offered materials to later Christian apologetics. Its method was, moreover, taken up in other contexts, as far as Blaise Pascal (1623-1662).
The man of flesh and bone: the guiding thread of a scattered thought
Can one, despite this diversity, speak of a « Spanish school of philosophy »? The question is delicate. Isidore of Seville, Francisco de Vitoria, Saint Teresa of Ávila, Baltasar Gracián, Miguel de Unamuno, José Ortega y Gasset, María Zambrano, Gustavo Bueno and Adela Cortina share neither the same method nor the same doctrine. Some are theologians, others materialists; some defend the faith, others analyse the sciences or the democratic institutions.
It is nonetheless possible to identify several constants throughout this history. The first is the attention paid to the concrete human being, for Spanish philosophy is often wary of pure consciousness, of the disembodied subject or of reason conceived as a faculty independent of life.
Miguel de Unamuno speaks of the man « of flesh and bone »; José Ortega y Gasset affirms that the subject is inseparable from his circumstance; María Zambrano seeks a reason capable of welcoming dream and suffering; Adela Cortina questions the rejection of the poor; even the School of Salamanca applies natural law to real peoples confronted with conquest and exploitation.
This priority accorded to the concrete explains the place of literature. The novel, the theatre, poetry and the essay are not mere ornaments: they make it possible to represent the contradictions of existence with a suppleness that the systematic treatise does not always offer. Don Quixote embodies in this context the tension between ideal and reality; Life Is a Dream transforms the problem of appearance into drama; mystical poetry explores an experience that exceeds ordinary language; the poetic reason of María Zambrano explicitly assumes this alliance between creation and knowledge.
A second constant lies in the search for integration. The Spanish tradition frequently tries to overcome dualisms (faith and reason, body and mind, individual and community, science and morality, subject and circumstance).
The natural theology of Ramon Sibiuda, for example, associates the book of nature and the Bible; Krausism seeks, for its part, harmony between religion, science and freedom; José Ortega y Gasset integrates reason into life; Eduardo Nicol links truth and dialogue; Adela Cortina associates rational argumentation and moral sensibility. However, such a will to synthesis does not mean that conflicts disappear. It expresses rather the conviction that the human being cannot be understood by amputating part of his experience.
The third constant is the centrality of the tragic and of disenchantment. Spanish philosophy is often formed in situations of crisis: imperial decline, civil war, exile, dictatorship, poverty or political fragmentation.
Baroque desengaño unveils the illusions of power and appearance; the tragic sense of Miguel de Unamuno starts from the contradiction between reason and the desire for immortality; María Zambrano meditates on exile; Gustavo Bueno deconstructs cultural and political myths.
The tragic does not, however, necessarily lead to nihilism. It becomes rather a driver of lucidity: to know that institutions are fragile or that existence is limited compels one to think the conditions of a responsible action.
The fourth constant is the link between speculation and ethics. Even when it addresses metaphysics, Spanish thought very often returns to the question of human conduct. How to act in uncertainty? How to treat the foreigner? What is a just war? Under what conditions is power legitimate? How to live with death? How to recognise the dignity of the poor?
This practical orientation perhaps explains why Spanish philosophy was long underestimated by the traditions attached to the construction of abstract systems. It does not renounce conceptual rigour, but refuses to separate that rigour from common life.
Rehabilitating Spanish reason: institutions, journals and the reconquest of the canon
Since the end of the last century, several institutions have nonetheless been working to have this tradition recognised. The Association of Philosophical Hispanism, for example, was founded in Madrid in September 1988. Based at the Centre for the Human and Social Sciences of the Higher Council for Scientific Research (CSIC, the Spanish equivalent of the CNRS), it brings together Spanish and foreign researchers specialising in the history of Iberian and Ibero-American thought. The association coordinates works, organises scholarly meetings and encourages the broadening of the corpora. Its action, moreover, concerns not only Spanish authors in the strict sense, but the whole of the philosophies of Spanish and Portuguese expression.
Moreover, since 1996, the Revista de Hispanismo Filosófico has constituted one of the principal organs of this field of research. Published annually with the support of the Fondo de Cultura Económica, it hosts historical studies, analyses of works and works on the international reception of Hispanic philosophers.
For its part, the University of Salamanca has organised since 1978 seminars on the history of Spanish philosophy. Held every two years without interruption, they form one of the oldest university spaces devoted to this discipline. Their location is, of course, highly symbolic, since Salamanca was one of the great intellectual centres of the second scholasticism. The Complutense University of Madrid publishes, for its part, the Anales del Seminario de Historia de la Filosofía, a journal that offers a regular framework for confronting Spanish thought with the general history of philosophy. The Academic Society of Philosophy and the Catalan Society of Philosophy also contribute to research and teaching. Their existence recalls that the philosophy produced in Spain is itself plural on the linguistic, territorial and institutional levels.
Let us note that platforms such as Dilemata (devoted notably to applied ethics) or again Filosofía & co. take part in the democratisation of these debates. They consequently make it possible to reach a wider public than that of the specialised academic journals.
Rehabilitation also passes through foreign universities. Toulouse has historically constituted an important pole of philosophical Hispanism in France, and the Panthéon-Sorbonne University organises comparative seminars devoted to modern and contemporary philosophies, in which the Spanish traditions can be reinscribed within a broader European framework. These initiatives respond to a stake that goes beyond mere memorial reparation, given that integrating Spanish philosophy into the canon does not consist in adding a few names to an already established list: it is a matter of modifying the way in which the history of Western thought is told.
Indeed, modernity was not built solely in the capitals of northern Europe. It was also formed in Salamanca in the face of the conquest of America, in the debates on the law of peoples, in the sceptical writings of Francisco Sánchez, in Krausist pedagogy, in the crisis of 1898 and in the Mexican universities where the republican exiles transplanted their philosophy. Reintegrating these trajectories also makes it possible to understand that ideas travel with merchants, missionaries, soldiers, refugees and translators. Intellectual history is inseparable from movements of power and from human displacements.
Vital reason, a resource for our time
Spanish philosophy finally offers instruments particularly useful for thinking the contemporary crises. The debates on war, sovereignty and the rights of populations recall the topicality of Francisco de Vitoria and Francisco Suárez. Thus, in a world marked by military interventions, rivalries of power and the contestation of international norms, their effort to subordinate force to a common law retains a profound resonance.
For their part, the analyses of the School of Salamanca on prices, money and contractual freedom bear witness to the necessity of articulating economics and morality, recalling that markets never function in a legal or ethical vacuum.
Baroque desengaño can, for its part, illuminate contemporary societies saturated with images, political narratives and technological promises. Miguel de Cervantes, Pedro Calderón de la Barca and Baltasar Gracián indeed teach us to be wary of appearances without thereby renouncing action or the ideal.
José Ortega y Gasset’s critique of the mass-man invites us, moreover, to reflect on the relationship between democracy, responsibility and culture in societies of instantaneous communication. His perspectivism also makes it possible to think plurality without sinking into absolute relativism.
Let us add that the poetic reason of María Zambrano reminds us that political crises are not only institutional problems: they touch memories, identities, emotions and imaginaries. A democracy cannot, at bottom, be reconstructed solely through procedures; it must also give a place to wounds and to narratives.
The concept of aporophobia elaborated by Adela Cortina also furnishes a particularly powerful tool for understanding the contradictions of globalised societies. It indeed unveils the economic selection that sometimes hides behind the discourses on the foreigner and shows that it is not always otherness that is rejected, but poverty and the supposed absence of usefulness.
The debates on transhumanism finally pose the question of the very definition of the human. In an age when technologies promise to modify bodies, capacities and perhaps the duration of life, the Spanish tradition reminds us that reason cannot be separated from vulnerability, from circumstance and from justice.
The originality of this philosophy therefore resides less in a single doctrine than in a certain orientation. It is wary of the abstractions that claim to explain man without taking account of his flesh, his history or his relations. It seeks, in short, to unite logic and experience, thought and responsibility.
Spain has not lost its reason; it is Europe that had mislaid it
The question posed in 1782 by Nicolas Masson de Morvilliers (« What do we owe to Spain? ») can, at the end of this brief survey, receive a precise answer. Europe owes it part of the transmission of ancient culture; the logical experiments of Ramon Llull; the mediation between Christian, Jewish and Muslim philosophies; the natural theology of Ramon Sibiuda; the theories of the law of nations of Francisco de Vitoria; the contractualism of Francisco Suárez; the first analyses of inflation and of subjective value; the scepticism of Francisco Sánchez; and certain intuitions on consciousness formulated by Gómez Pereira.
It also owes it the existential depth of Miguel de Cervantes and Pedro Calderón de la Barca; the moral psychology of Baltasar Gracián; the effort of scientific popularisation of Benito Jerónimo Feijoo; the educational project of the Free Institution of Education; the tragic sense of Miguel de Unamuno; the vital reason of José Ortega y Gasset; the poetic reason of María Zambrano; the metaphysics of expression of Eduardo Nicol; the materialism of Gustavo Bueno; and the cordial ethics of Adela Cortina.
The lack of awareness of this tradition is explained by geopolitical rivalries, the lasting effects of the black legend, the internal Spanish crises and the dominance of too narrow a definition of philosophy. Because it often preferred the novel to the system, the essay to the conceptual summa or spiritual experience to formal demonstration, it was placed outside the philosophical field.
This exclusion does not, however, withstand examination. From the University of Salamanca to the Mexican institutions of the exile, Spanish thought confronted the great questions of its time. It sought to determine the limits of power, the rights of the foreigner, the legitimacy of war, the value of exchange, the place of faith, the meaning of death and the responsibility of the individual in history.
It above all developed a conception of reason profoundly different from abstract intellectualism. Reason does not exist outside life: it belongs to a vulnerable being, situated in a historical circumstance, engaged in relations with others and exposed to death. It is worth something only if it makes it possible to inhabit the world better.
This « vital reason » does not constitute merely a national contribution to be juxtaposed with the French, German or British traditions; it invites us rather to rethink the general history of philosophy. It reminds us, indeed, that ideas are not born solely in the solitude of systems, but in contact with wars, conquests, exiles, crises and encounters between civilisations.
Spain has therefore never been a country without philosophy. It has rather been a country whose philosophy was to be found where historians did not think to look for it, namely in spiritual exercises and legal treatises, in novels and plays, in colonial controversies, in classrooms, in the camps of exile and in the ethical debates of contemporary democracy.
The current stake no longer consists merely in repairing a national oversight. It is a matter of recognising that a Western history amputated of its Iberian component can fully understand neither the formation of international law, nor the contradictions of European expansion, nor the modern forms of existentialism, nor the transatlantic circulation of knowledge.
Long accused of having turned its back on reason, Spain has perhaps accomplished a more radical operation: it has reminded reason that it possessed a body, a history and a responsibility.
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