Xavier Zubiri

Biography

He was a member of the School of Madrid, composed by philosophers José Ortega y Gasset, Julián Marías and Pedro Laín Entralgo, among others. Zubiri's philosophy has been categorized as a "materialist open realism", which "attempted to reformulate classical metaphysics, in a language that was entirely compatible with modern science". This relates to Xavier Zubiri's educational background. Zubiri first received a philosophical and theological formation in Madrid and Rome. Later, he deepend his studies in philosophy through his graduate studies in Louvain, writing his dissertation on phenomenology. In 1929, Zubiri's critical interest in this current of thought took him to Freiburg, when he already was a professor in Madrid. There, he studied with Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger. In 1930, Zubiri moved to Berlin, where he studied physics, philology and biology. There, he was hosted in Harnack House, which enabled Zubiri to socialize with important minds of this great period of academic activity in the Weimar republic. For example, Albert Einstein (whom Zubiri had already met in Madrid, at Universidad Central, in 1923), Max Planck, Werner Jaeger, Erwin Schrödinger, among others.

When civil war broke out in Spain in 1936, Zubiri moved to Paris. There, he continued having an intensive intellectual life, attending courses with Louis de Broglie, Frédéric Joliot, Irène Curie, Elie Joseph Cartan and Emile Benveniste, among others. In 1939, just before France declared war to Germany, Zubiri returned to Spain. Zubiri's philosophy is little known outside of Spain and Latin America, mostly because Zubiri was compelled to resign from formal academic positions in Spain, in 1942. This had to do with the lack of academic freedoms in Francisco Franco's regime. However, it was possible for Zubiri to continue his work as an academic, through the sponsorship of family and friends. Zubiri was a prolific author in the Spanish magazines Cruz y Raya (led by José Bergamín) and Revista de Occidente (led by José Ortega y Gasset) under the second Spanish republic. However, after his resignation from Spanish universities, Zubiri did not publish much in established peer reviewed journals. Nonetheless, he did publish a series of books and research articles. Zubiri's work was initially not well received by established academic environments in Spain. This was mostly explained by the political context under Franco. But Zubiri's relationship to scholars like Ignacio Ellacuria made Zubiri's work widely known in Latin America, where Zubiri's thought has been further developed.

Recently, Spanish academics have begun to recognize the importance of Zubiri's life and philosophy. For the same reasons outlined above, Zubiri's contact with the formal academic environments of the English speaking world was limited. There is all but one recorded visit by Zubiri to the United States, specifically Princeton University, on October 2, 1946. In Princeton, Zubiri lectured in French on "The real and mathematics- A philosophical problem" ("Le reel et les mathematiques—Un probleme de philosophie"). Some of Zubiri's work has been translated to English: "On Essence" (Caponigri, 1980), "Sentient Intelligence" (Fowler, 1999), "The Dynamic Structure of Reality" (Orringer, 2003) and "The Fundamental problems of Western Metaphysics" (Redondo & Fowler 2009). Despite his relative academic isolation at home in Spain, Zubiri has also been recognized in other countries. In 1979, the German government awarded Zubiri and Laín Entralgo the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany. Zubiri was awarded this distinction for his work in his books "Nature, History, God" (1954) and "On Essence" (1962). Zubiri's work has also been translated to French, German, Italian and Portuguese.