I was in high school when I first read Plato's Phaedo.<1>Foot note 1 A few years later I read at least parts of other Platonic dialogues, such as Parmenides and Sophist. When I entered University (at 16, in 1960) I also read some parts of Hegel's Logic. Perhaps owing to such early readings, I soon became interested in discovering contradictions in reality: at that stage I was already prone to regard our becoming world as a blend of being and not-being, things in our world being equal and yet not-equal, beautiful and not-beautiful, here and yet not here, etc. It was not long before I realized classical two-valued logic was incompatible with such views. Other people sharing my contradictorialist leanings waived «formal» logic altogether, but I was bent on finding out an alternative, multi-valued logic allowing for true contradictions.

That was about 1963 (I was 18 then), but my life was destined (by the gods) to follow a tortuous path, which kept me far from philosophy for many years (the heady 60's, you see). At that stage I also became infatuated with Hegelian Marxism.

Ever since I undertook studying philosophy again in 1972, my main motivation has been to develop those views by setting up a [mathematical] contradictorial logic and applying it to the treatment of a wide array of philosophical problems, from metaphysics to ethics.

At that stage, though, a new idea had become dominant in my approach (and has ever since kept sway on my mind -- until other people manage to persuade me it is wrong), namely that most properties we speak about come in degrees. Well, hardly news for a true disciple of Plato, you may object! The Platonic kingdom of the metaxú (the in-between) is the huge domain of what neither [entirely] is nor [completely] fails to be, of what is so-and-so only to some extent or other.

I had not become aware of the significance of gradualism for a contradictorialist view of reality when I first embraced such a view. But from 1975 onwards fuzzy logic has been the framework of my research (even if my own approach to fuzzy logic is miles away from Zadeh's on crucial issues).

Outside the Platonic-Hegelian tradition (within which a powerful influence on me has been exerted, for many years, by Nicholas de Cusa's thought), Leibniz has been the philosopher who has attracted me most. Ever since I read his Monadology at 17 I have been sympathetic to Leibniz's philosophical rationalistic outlook and to a cluster of his driving views; e.g. adherence to such principles as identity of indiscernibles, sufficient reason, continuity, ontic harmony; hence (soft) determinism and ontic «maximalism» [the Great Chain of Being] -- a view which has been intertwined with modal realism, which I've embraced under a version different for David Lewis's (one of the main differences being that I do not look upon possible worlds as spatio-temporal wholes, but as sets of states of affairs, which entails that they may share individual components).

It would be unfair on my part not to mention Nicolai Hartmann, the only contemporary non-analytical philosopher to have ever influenced me deeply. I first read several books of his Ontology series in the mid sixties, as a University student. Although his philosophical thought has never again captivated me, I realize I still owe him a great deal in a number of indirect ways.

As a youngster I had -- cautiously and healf-heartdly -- rejected the Scholastic teaching I was then exposed to (it was more or less official under Franco's dictatorship). But even then my rejection was qualified and far less sweeping than my friends'. E.g. I always remained strongly attracted to Anselm's ontological argument, and deep down I preferred some form of pantheism or panentheism rather than atheism. Later on (while still abiding by my anti-Aristotelian convictions) I've tended to agree with a variety of traditional views shared by a number of scholastic thinkers -- among others --: the acceptance of some sort of divine reality; that of the existence of universals; an ontological (Augustinian) account of truth (truth as existence states of affairs); the espousal of jusnaturalism. To sum up, views which belong with metaphysical realism.

The issue of metaphysical realism brings me to my inquiry into problems in theory of knowledge. For many years -- starting with my Hegelian spree as a University student in the 60's -- some sort of epistemological coherentism appeared to me as what best we could hope for in that field. Cartesian foundationalism seemed to me chimeric and irrealistic. Afterwards, Quinean holism and -- to some extent -- Rescher's rehabilitation of Bradley's epistemological views pushed me further in that direction. Despite a later interest for reliabilism, a recent version of coherentism has remained my main attraction pole in that field.

For a couple of decades my research has been given over chiefly to problems in logic, philosophy of logic, philosophy of language and metaphysics -- with a few minor incursions into history of philosophy, contributing hermeneutical essays on Plato, St. Augustine, Nicolas de Cusa, Hegel, Frege, Leibniz, and other philosophers.

I am working now on a nonstandard set theory, which I call `theory of cumulations'. A cumulation (a crowd, a clump, a bunch) is something which comprises or gathers whatever entities share a certain characteristic future. Unlike the sets of standard set theory, cumulations are not just the-members-put-together. Nonetheless cumulations are extensional, although their extensionality is a qualified one: for any two different cumulations there is at least one entity that in some respect or other and at least at some time is more gahetered by one of the two cumulations than by the other. A cumulation may comprise members which fail to have the characteristic feature associated with it. Such are weird cumulations -- e.g. the crowd of crowds that entirely fail to gather temselves: that crowd does in fact gather itself, and so lacks its characteristic feature. The cumulation of all entities that are so-and-so is the smallest cumulation gathering all such entities.

That kind of approach can also be applied to a semantic theory: the strong Liar is a setence, Epimenesis, which is not true at all. Epimenesis turns out to be true, while what it says -- namely, that Epimenesis is not true at all -- is not the case at all. Again truth is the smallest cumulation gathering all sentences that say something which is the case.

The focus of my philosophical interests is now shifting towards the implementation of a new deontic and juridical logic, and towards issues in philosophy of law -- although of course germane to ontological questions concerning degrees of truth and reality, personal identity and individuation, enduring entities, personal continuity, the reality of collectivities, inter-species relations etc.

I am working on a fuzzy paraconsistent system in deontic and juridical logic including non-standard logical (comparative) constants such as `more' and `less' (implementing a degrees-on-entitlement approach). We are also interested in philosophical issues related to the dichotomy of civil law vs common law (my own feeling being that the suppleness and leeway allowed for in common law systems -- as against the artificial rigidity of constrained consistent civil-law codes -- is more reasonable from the viewpoint of a conception which takes licitness degrees seriously).

In due course I also intend to develop a comprehensive study of property rights -- again from a gradualistic viewpoint. I personally advocate a gradual, step-by-step fading-away of private ownership, to be replaced with less overpowering or obtrusive entitlements to varying measures of private enjoyment and usage of common goods.

What turns out to be common in this context is what is, or had better be, shared and jointly possessed by at least the entire human kind, namely the Earth as a whole. (Migratory rights come much to the fore here.) . But in fact, my research is also meant to show that non-humans, too, must be recognized the right to have happy lives -- in so for as their nature allows them to -- and so to share in the common possession of the Earth. Entitlement conflicts are bound to arise, and they must be coped with within a gradualistic flexible framework.

At that time (1959-60) studying Greek was still mandatory for many teenagers in Spain -- a happy obligation which unfortunately has been repealed since.Back to main body of the paper