Participants

A philosopher and specialist in ontology and philosophy of science, he is an Emeritus Professor at the Autonomous University of Barcelona. After going to live in Paris as a young man, he studied philosophy at the Sorbonne and obtained a PhD with a thesis on the Aristotelian order. After spending some years teaching in France, he was one of the founders of an interdisciplinary faculty at the University of the Basque Country, where he was the first head of the Department of Philosophy. He is also founder and coordinator for the last twenty-five years of the International Ontology Congress, which is sponsored by UNESCO. He has been a guest professor and has given lectures at several universities around the world, among them the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro and the Venice International University, where he was awarded the International Prize of the Istituto Veneto di Scienze in 2009. Moreover, he has received an honorary doctorate from the University of the Basque Country. His work, which has been awarded the Anagrama and Espasa prizes for the essay, includes the titles Reducción y combate del animal humano (Ariel, 2014) and Pitágoras. En la infancia de la filosofía (Shackleton, 2015). His most recent essay, Tras la física. Arranque jónico y renacer cuántico (Abada, 2019), offers a historical account of the relations between physics and philosophy at the heart of the western tradition, showing the link between classical thinkers and twentieth-century physics.