Presentation from the Ignacio Larramendi Foundation

Luis Hernando de Larramendi Martínez
Executive Vice-President
Ignacio Larramendi Foundation

Ego, Franciscus Santius, hispanus, natus in civitate tudensi… These words are transcribed by one of the best scholars that Francisco Sánchez, H. P. Cazac has ever had and can be consulted in a deserving work - of which there is a Spanish translation in theRevista de Archivos, Bibliotecas y Museos (1904); pp. 159-176, dispelled, or should have dispelled, any doubt about the place of origin of the philosopher, who has become known in history as the Sceptic. However, the fact that there is a certain dispute between Portugal and Spain to claim the cradle of the illustrious thinker is not a cause for displeasure for us, quite the contrary, since it proves the very close link that has existed for centuries between thinkers, that is to say, Portuguese and Spanish polygraphs, and which in our opinion should be strengthened even more in the future.

I have recently prologued a new book of our already long collaboration with the Asociación de Hispanismo Filosófico (Association of Philosophical Hispanism ) and that in this case corresponds to the First Portuguese-Spanish Philosophical Conference that follows this line of thought.

I believe that the real interest in publishing Francisco Sánchez's work on the Internet, using the most modern technologies, as is usual practice at the Ignacio Larramendi Foundation, thanks to the commendable work of its subsidiary company DIGIBÍS, lies in the need felt by European scientists, and Sánchez was above all a doctor, to search for an epistemological database for knowledge that would enable to establish his clinical practice and research on solid foundations.

Much of the fame of this epistemological foundation of knowledge is almost universally attributed to Descartes, and it is certainly not the intention of our project to deny it at all. However, it is, and this was precisely the intention that encouraged my father, Ignacio Hernando de Larramendi, in collaboration with the then Director of the Menéndez Pelayo Library and now Project Director of the Ignacio Larramendi Foundation, to make these realities known, using the methods provided by advanced computing, which are often limited to a restricted circle of specialists.

No. In the Spanish Golden Age, a Galician from Tui, a city with which I feel deeply identified for reasons of familiarity, already realised that it was necessary to apply a healthy scepticism on which to base scientific advances. It is also true that in the 16th century the works of the Greek sceptics, especially Pyrrho (360-270 B.C.) and their great disseminator Sextus Empiricus (ca.160-210) were beginning to become popular.

In particular, with the edition of the Outlines of Pyrrhonism (Πυρρ?νειοι ?ποτ?πωσεις, Pyrrh?neioi hypotyp?seis), published in Paris in 1562 [1] and which, without a doubt, was read in Toulouse, Tolosa of France, as it was known at the time, by the great doctor from Tui.

This methodological scepticism coloured the whole century and it is curious that the author, who with more art, wonderful prose and unsurpassable style, Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592), the lord of the mountain as Quevedo would call him, coloured the entire sixteenth century with his famous Que sais-je? It seems to be demonstrated by the rigorous criticism that Montaigne and Sánchez were related [2] and that both had certainly studied in Bordeaux, at the Collège de Guyenne.

When any reader enters into the reading and re-reading of the Discourse of the Method and retains its teachings and goes on to read at a given moment the About nothing being known, he is surprised at every moment by the identity of the affirmations that Francisco Sánchez wrote for his book and, with variations, that it is impossible to qualify as casual, Descartes repeated in his own. But we had said that this was the spirit of the times.

In fact, another Spaniard born in Medina del Campo in 1500, and of whom there is a possible portrait by none other than El Greco, wrote in hisAntoniana Margarita [3], after a line of reasoning, these lines that precede the Cartesian cogito. I know that I know something, anyone who knows exists, then I exist (nosco me aliquid noscere, et quidquid noscit est, ergo ego sum).

All this has led us to bring together in this Digital Library not only Francisco Sánchez's works, but also references to Pyrrho (360-270 B.C.), to Empiricus (ca.160-210), to Gómez Pereira (1500-1558) to Montaigne (1533- 1592) and to Descartes (1596-1650), establishing links between them according to linked and open data technology. And so put into context what one of the great scholars of the subject,Eloy Bullón systematically demonstrated more than a century ago in his book Los precursores españoles de Bacon y Descartes [4](1905).

Well, we are firmly convinced, both from the MAPFRE Foundation, and from the Ignacio Larramendi Foundation, that it is essential to publish all this knowledge on the web in order to achieve the maximum possible visibility (which will be helped by the technology developed by DIGIBIS, with a clear focus on R&D&I) and thus prove and make known to the Ibero-American community, which plays an increasingly prominent role in the world, that its contribution to modernity was immense and that they should legitimately feel proud of him, as I feel, a native of Tui by adoption, of Francisco Sánchez, natus in civitate tudensi.