Pedro Ribas, translator of Kant and glorious skilled on Miguel de Unamuno, dies | Culture | EUROtoday

The humanist physician Andrés Laguna wrote that now we have the duty to succeed in the “end of life in fullness”, to “the line that is not proposed” if we dwell “cautiously, soberly and temperately”. Well, definitely, the instructor, companion and instance of coexistence that has been Pedro Ribas accomplished his days final Friday, January 9, and he has executed so with the assure of getting lived in accordance with the principles of that clever physician.

Born on the island of Ibiza, son, due to this fact, of the Mediterranean whose waters have bathed historic cultures that the ocean itself fed from the rivers that crossed Europe, he was a common man who died exactly when the fifth centenary of the foundations of what’s often known as the “Law of Nations” is commemorated. Pedro has been an instance of that spirit, which the Brazilian jurist Antonio Cançado Trindade related to the idea of proper purpose, that’s, that which relies on the rules of justice, good religion and benevolence.

Trained on the Pontifical University of Salamanca and, later, on the Complutense University of Madrid, he was a disciple of the Dominican historian, Guillermo Fraile, with whom he took the primary steps in understanding the historical past of Spanish philosophy, though that friar’s imaginative and prescient was from a really conservative perspective. He has been a part of the group often known as “young philosophers”: that’s, these born within the Nineteen Forties, within the post-war interval, a few of whom joined the newly based Autonomous University of Madrid, on the flip of the last decade from the Nineteen Sixties to the Nineteen Seventies, introduced collectively by Professor Carlos París, the primary director of the Department of Philosophy. Years, then, the tip of Francoism and the start of the transformation in the direction of democratic Spain, with the vicissitudes suffered between teams and tendencies that have been projected on all areas of life, science and philosophy, financial and social relations to embody the discourses of legitimation that might govern nationwide and worldwide coexistence.

Member of a really giant household (eleven siblings), Ribas shared stays in Germany with different Spanish emigrants within the sixties and this fashioned in Pedro a social conscience in favor of the working class, which lasted in him all through his life. These stays would additionally mark his private life: there he met Ortrun, who has been his spouse and help for all times, and he acquired data of German life and language, which skilled him as a mediator between each cultures. Subsequent stays on the University of Berlin would full his educational coaching.

Already a professor on the Autonomous University of Madrid in 1968, he joined the road initiated by Carlos Paris of renewal of philosophy in dialogue with science, schooling and political and social life. Together with Professor Diego Núñez, each opted for the research of essentially the most forgotten Spanish traditions, creating a particular topic on the History of Spanish Thought for undergraduate college students and a line of analysis that was instantly consolidated and has continued to the current. He could be expelled (“His contract was not renewed,” expressed in administrative language) and he wouldn’t be capable of rejoin till 1977. Since then and till his retirement in 2006, now as a professor, his life has been spent as a professor at this college, leaving an indelible reminiscence of friendship, dedication and loyalty.

There have been three essential traces of his work as a researcher: translator of Kant, whose Critique of Pure Reason It was revealed in Spanish in 1978 and since then it turned the reference for Spanish readers of the writer that we establish with the Enlightenment. From there to these made in recent times and devoted to Herder. Essay on the origin of language (2022), God. Some conversations about Espinosa’s system (2024), A metacritique of the Critique of Pure Reason (2025).

An awesome scholar of social actions, Pedro Ribas has devoted an essential a part of his analysis to the reception of Marx and Marxism in Spain. Research initiatives which have produced a number of dozen publications have been the supply that has nourished this a part of the historical past of Spanish thought. The quote from these two titles is sufficient right here, the newest: “Did Marx avoid dealing with morality and justice in his analysis of capitalism?” (Azafea, 2023); and possibly the primary Approach to the historical past of Spanish Marxism (1990).

Finally, Pedro Ribas is an internationally acknowledged authority for his works on Miguel de Unamuno, an writer whom he arrived at, absolutely, from the orientations set out within the earlier sections: the social dimension of the work of the “universal Basque” and his reference to German authors. His books To learn Unamuno (2016), Philosophy, politics and literature in Unamuno (2017) y Letters from Germany (2022), edited with Fernando Hermida, together with different comparable texts and a very good variety of articles, are half, in their very own proper, of the literature on who was thought-about a “modern intellectual.”

Pedro didn’t neglect the philosophy cultivated in America as a standard framework of an Ibero-American thought, by the hands of Unamuno himself who had so many correspondents on the opposite aspect of the Atlantic, or the exiled Adolfo Sánchez Vázquez, so near the UAM division itself, or the Peruvian José Carlos Mariátegui.

Pedro Ribas leaves this work, the results of an infinite effort, continued till the final days and he bequeaths us, for example, a way of life typical of the college, with the need of a accountable professor, respectful of scholars and all the time keen to dialogue.

As the UNAM professor, Ambrosio Velasco, expressed within the e-mail that remembered Professor Pedro Ribas: “Freed from corporal chains, as Sor Juana says, his spirit and his works endure with us.”