Bulletin of the Santayana Society, No. 33 Fall 2015

              Manuel Garrido Jimenez (1925-2015)
Manuel Garrido Jimenez, one of the most important figures in contemporary
Spanish philosophy, sadly passed away in Madrid on January 8th,
2015. His departure means the disappearance of an intellectual who still
regarded philosophy as a protean discipline, different in aim and scope from the
natural and social sciences, but in permanent dialogue with them. His University
teaching career was devoid of any dogmatism or sectarianism and he was well-
known for his absolute generosity and his contempt for philosophical quackery,
personalisms, and fashions.
Prof. Manuel Garrido held the Chair of Logic and Philosophy of Science at the
University of Valencia (1962-79), at the Autonomous University of Madrid (1979-
83), and at the Complutense University of Madrid from 1983 until 1991, when he
retired.
Prof. Garrido's stay at the University of Valencia marked a significant period for
Spanish philosophy On the one side, from the 1960s onwards he played a key role in
the introduction of such disciplines as Symbolic Logic, Philosophy of Science, and
Philosophy of Language into Spanish universities. Thus, his book Logica simbolica
became a reference for many students of humanities in Spain and Latin America.
On the other side, Prof. Manuel Garrido (together with his wife Carmen) founded in
1971 the Philosophy journal Teorema, which brought to Spain the topics, concepts
and methods of Analytic Philosophy in some sense, as Jose Ortega y Gasset had
done with Phenomenology four decades earlier.
Furthermore, from the late 1960s Prof. Garrido organized in Valencia (and later
in Madrid in the 1980s) a series of yearly symposia and philosophical meetings,
including the massive and controversial "Philosophy and science in Spanish
contemporary thought" (1972), perhaps the foundation of "new" Spanish philosophy
These meetings featured as invited guests people such as Gustav Bermann, Noam
Chomsky, Jonathan Leonard Cohen, Donald Davidson, Alwin Diemer, Michael
Dummett, Peter Geach, Jose Ferrater Mora, Jiirgen Habermas, Stuart Hampshire,
Gisbert Hasenjager, Friedrich von Hayek, Franz von Kutschera, Kuno Lorenz,
David Pears, Karl Popper, Hilary Putnam, Willard Van Orman Quine, John Searle,
Peter Strawson, Christian Thiel, and Georg Henrik von Wright, to name only some
of the best-known participants.
Prof. Garrido was a distinguished specialist in the philosophy of Miguel de
Unamuno and Jose Ortega. And from his student years he kept a strong attachment
to the philosophy of George Santayana and a deep concern for its neglect in Spain.
In 1996, as a result of this ongoing concern, he set himself the task of rescuing
Santayana's thought for Spain. To this end, he promoted the publication of Limbo: An
International Bulletin for the Study of Santayana, as a supplement of Teorema, both
to make Santayana's philosophy better known and to strengthen the links between
Santayana scholars from Spain and America. He also fostered the publication of
numerous hitherto forgotten works by Santayana in different book series issued by
the Tecnos, Catedra, and KRK publishing houses.