Presentation from the MAPFRE Foundation

Alberto Manzano Martos
President of the MAPFRE Foundation

 

Firma de Francisco Sánchez, el EscépticoThe MAPFRE Foundation is always pleased to collaborate with the Ignacio Larramendi Foundation because we all know him in the great Spanish and even world known insurance company as howwhomanaged the MAPFRE system for 35 years considered the founding action of culture to be one of the essential aspects of his work. The book that the the MAPFRE Tavera Foundation edited, Mecenazgo cultural de Ignacio Hernando de Larramendi y Montiano: crónica y testimonios (2002) is the best proof of this.

Thus, this new collaboration that we have been establishing with the Ignacio Larramendi Foundation takes up initiatives such as those of the MAPFRE America Foundation and its extraordinary MAPFRE 1492 collection, the Tavera Institute, the MAPFRE Tavera Foundation and, in short, all the projects that are unanimously well received by international critics and whose usefulness is essential for persevering in this direction.

In this sense, and within the framework of the agreement that we are currently developing with the Ignacio Larramendi Foundation, I now have the honour to make a few preliminary comments on another of its Virtual Libraries. In autumn 2011, I also had the opportunity to present the Virtual Library of the School of Salamanca, which, by means of the digitization of a very wide range of texts, showed the establishment of all kinds of relations, the enormous importance that the work of this group of Spanish and Portuguese scholars had had in the fields of International Law, Political Economy, Natural Sciences and Anthropology, and all this thanks to the use of very advanced techniques that the Ignacio Larramendi Foundation is gradually using.

On this occasion, the Ignacio Larramendi Foundation, through the creation of the Francisco Sánchez Virtual Library, highlights nothing less than the epistemological underpinnings of modern knowledge, which is usually attributed to Descartes, but which has very clear Spanish precursors.

At the MAPFRE Foundation, the foundation of a company spread all over the world and with a very important relevance in the Latin American countries, we believe that it is necessary to highlight knowledge reserved only for scholars and often in publications that are difficult to find. To achieve this, there is nothing better than the publication on the Web of all these evidential texts that will allow the scholar to confront for the first time the evidence of the very important Spanish contribution to the epistemological foundation of modern knowledge, which is so often attributed exclusively to Francis Bacon (1561-1626) and to René Descartes (1596-1650).

The Virtual Library of Francisco Sánchez proves, or rather, allows us to prove, that this was not completely the case, since it contains texts in whose reading appear, either because they share common sources or because of the originality of Hispanic thought, the ideas and sometimes literal phrases from such significant works in the history of thought as Le Discours de la Méthode (1637)

To do this, the Ignacio Larramendi Foundation, with the collaboration of the MAPFRE Foundation, has not limited itself to digitizing and editing on the Web some texts that, speaking for themselves, clearly come from the academic world or from very restricted editions and, above all, they use very advanced computer technologies to establish conceptual links that allow us to browse between some authors and others, as well as between their works.

All of this can be rightly referred to as "adding value", since these analyses and studies were scattered in scholarly publications, but now they appear on the Web, as I have already said, with very advanced computer relations that have been developed, in part, thanks to the contribution of the MAPFRE Foundation.

If one of the functions of the MAPFRE Foundation is to enhance the value of Spanish culture, there is no doubt that this project will be completely successful.