Lorenzo Peña
Encyclopedia
Lorenzo Peña is a Spanish philosopher
, lawyer
, logic
ian and political thinker
. His rationalism
is a neo-Leibnizian approach both in metaphysics
and law
.
, Spain
, on August 29, 1944. Persecuted by Franco
's regime, his mother (born in the Madrid Royal Palace in 1911) was not allowed to return to the Spanish capital city until 1952.
In Madrid Peña was taught Greek and Indoeuropean linguistics by the renowned Spanish philologist Francisco Rodríguez-Adrados and ethics by J.L. Aranguren.
Upon becoming a political activist in February 1962, he was forced to emigrate in the spring 1965. In early 1969 he married his class-mate María Teresa Alonso in Meudon
(France
); the couple have been living together ever since. While staying in Paris he was a disciple of the French historian Pierre Vilar and he witnessed the upheaval of May 1968. He gave up all clandestine activities in 1972. After spending 18 years in exile, he went back to Spain in 1983.
philosophy degree (licenciatura) from the PUCE (the Ecuadorian Pontifical University in Quito
), with a thesis on Saint Anselm's ontological proof of God's existence, his adviser being Julio C. Terán, S.J., who taught him hermeneutics. He then spent four years in Liège, Belgium, (1975–1979) where, under the supervision of Paul Gochet, he wrote his dissertation on a system of contradictorial (paraconsistent) logic. At that time he was also granted a complementary degree in American Studies by Liège University.
Upon receiving his Ph.D. in 1979, he came back to Ecuador. He was a professor at the PUCE for four years and later on, after returning to Spain, at León University for another three years. In 1987 he was appointed senior scientific researcher at the CSIC (Spain's main academic research institution).
He spent six months in Canberra
as a visiting scholar (1992–1993), under the guidance of the late Richard Sylvan
, and was a colleague of Philip Pettit
at the philosophy department of the Australian National University. Later on he shifted his research orientation to the philosophy of law. He became a lawyer by earning an M.L. (DEA) from Madrid Autonomous University in 2007. He then affiliated with the Madrid Bar. He reached the highest academic professional level (Research Professor) in 2006.
Peña is the founder and Editor of the digital journal
http://www.sorites.orgSORITES and the leader of JuriLog (Logical Jurisprudence), the
http://jurilog.es
logic-and-law research group at the CSIC, which is carrying out an inquiry into nomological concepts and values.
Although ontophantics is essentially a metaphysical doctrine, its starting point was a methodological approach through the philosophy of language, based on a realist semiotic theory to the effect that what is shown by language is also said (as against the Tractarian dichotomy), namely reality or being. Rather than regarding sentences and states of affairs in a static way, as logical atomists have done, ontophantics looks upon them dynamically, as transitions or processes. To utter a statement is not a mere series of successive actions of uttering the sentence's components but a transit from one saying into another along a temporal dimension. Likewise facts are nontemporal transitions consisting in a relation passing from one thing to another.
Since all passages seem to be subject to Zeno's paradox of the arrow, a
paraconsistent logic
is resorted to in order to solve the puzzle. Instead of blaming contradictions on thought or language Peña ascribes them to reality by embracing a non-classical logic
.
Another feature of ontophantics is the rejection of all forms of essentialism in the sense of considering attributions of being-so independent of assertions of being or existence—an opinion Peña attributes to Aristotle and Meinong. Peña's existence-oriented ontology identifies each entity with a fact, its existence. Ontological truth is also identified with existence, which is a reduplicative property. Ontophantics follows Frege's view of sentences as names of objects, but in this case the objects under consideration are states of affairs. From a linguistic perspective phenomena of nominalization are thus gone into from an outlook which eliminates any categorical cleavages. Such a metaphysical theory is strongly Platonistic. Ontophantics is also a modal realism, which takes reality to be all-encompassing, and thus comprising non-actual worlds.
Ontophantics contains a holistic theory of knowledge influenced by Gonseth and Quine, considering the cleavage between analytic and synthetic judgments a matter of degree. This epistemological holism is a sort of empirical coherentism, for which the task of human knowledge is to set up theories, to confront them with experience taken as a whole and to gradually modify them. Not only foundationalism of any kind is rejected but reliabilism is not accepted either, since no procedure is to be unconditionally trusted come what may.
Peña rehabilitates induction as a sound ground even for logical truth
s (he follows the outdated opinion of J. S. Mill). The choice among alternative logical systems has to be made in accordance with plausible criteria, one of which is fitness with the best explanation of available evidence, thus resorting to an optimization postulate, which in turn gets circularly warranted by its epistemological fruitness.
That optimization postulate is a rationality ideal which also provides a ground for assuming God's existence. Peña's first published book, The coincidence of opposites in God (Quito, 1981), was a discussion of the proofs of God's inexistence canvassed in the analytical philosophy of religion. He broached the question through a combination of a contradictorial logic and a non-standard set theory (in a way a mirror reversion of Quine's ML system), which regards infinite entities as not being subject to the principle of separation in virtue of which a thing is comprised by the set of entities with a certain characteristic only to the extent it has that characteristic. In that book he adopted determinism and rejected free will, a position he has maintained ever since, using it as a lever while grappling with issues in the philosophy of law.
Peña's plan to investigate the grounds of his logical system as a nonclassical combinatory logic has thus far remained programmatic, but the combinatory account fits his metaphysical approach.
began short after his 1979 Ph.D. diss. The first paper he published on the issue appeared in 1988. At that time, he essentially clung to von Wright's standard approach, departing from it only by introducing degrees and admitting normative contradictions or antinomies. He soon became dissatisfied with that scheme which proved to be incompatible with serious applications of deontic logic to the practice of legal reasoning. He found out the flaw was to think of deontic logic as a species of the genus modal logic by stressing the similarities between duty and necessity, and between licitness and possibility.
The underlying mistake, according to Peña, is a wrong metaphysical assumption which denies the existence of deontic states of affairs connected by implications. That denial pushes deontic logicians to conceive of deontic logic as the logic of duty-compliances. Thus if A necessarily implies B, standard deontic logic believes that the duty to do A implies a duty to do B—this is the rule of logical closure. That rule is one of the first dogmas waived by Peña's deontic approach.
Peña was thus prompted to produce a new system of deontic logic, Juridicial Logic, or JL, combining a number of particularities which make it unique:
Peña claims that the valid principles of logic in general and deontic logic in particular are found by induction, through a circular holistic process. It is only by studying normative reasoning as it really happens in legal practice that sanitized sets of axioms and inference rules can be devised and then subject to the acid test of applicability.
Peña classifies ethical theories into two groups: internalism and externalism
, the former valuing conducts according to intrinsic features. Externalism comes in two ways: antecedentalism and consequentialism
. There are two sorts of consequentialism: monistic and pluralistic, the former maintaining that there is one ethical property practical consequences of actions must have in order to render the action ethically valuable. Utilitarianism is a monist consequentialism.
Peña is a pluralist. He is inclined to a pluralistic consequentialism, but his approach can be taken to transcend the very dichotomy, since, once no unique criterion is looked for, actions ought to be assessed in a number of ways according to different values, some of which are not necessarily teleological. Since the approach is gradualistic, ethical valuations are taken to be scales with infinitely many degrees combined in infinitely complex compositions. Withal, the nearer a causal consequence of our action is, the higher its ethical significance. Peña implements ethical pluralistic gradualism through his paraconsistent fuzzy logic: actions can be regarded as both good and bad, better in certain respects and worse in other respects.
As for the units of behaviour to be assessed, Peña's ideas are close to virtue ethics in that he thinks isolated actions are generally too narrow unities to be reasonably appraised, although a whole course of life is too broad. Something in-between is a more adequate candidate, which means a span of one's life evincing a continuation of purposes, choices and habits.
Peña admits that a pluralistic axiology faces a serious difficulty, namely that it provides no clear guidance for action, unless there is an objective all-things-considered perspective. He claims that sometimes there is no such perspective and that in those cases choices are justified by one's previous allegiance to the prevalence of certain values. But even when an all-things-considered outlook is warranted, its existence does not mean that contradictory valuations are merely prima facie. Thus ethical contradictions cannot be evaded.
Human progress being continuous, no historic leaps are possible and so there is no objective ground for any periodization. Any delimitation of epochs is a matter of mere convenience. The law of human progress is not to be assimilated to grand schemes postulating a predetermined succession of ages, such as those of the Stoics, Vico, Hegel, A. Comte and K. Marx.
Peña's philosophy of history shares with those forerunners the view of human history as universal, both backwards and forwards. There is a common ancestry, which entails that at least a few elements of disparate human traditions go back to our shared origin. Those elements have been, time and again, strengthened by the mutual borrowing of concepts, techniques, institutions and procedures. There is also a common destination, owing to our shared Planet and a converging tendency, which needs no mysterious invisible hand but results from objective constraints.
Peña's philosophy of history acknowledges collective minds, which supervene on individual minds. No society can exist without a common memory and common plans of living-together and reaching common aims (which does not mean that all members of the body politic share those feelings; Peña rejects any mandatory imposition of beliefs or values).
Peña does not deny the existence of historic breaks caused by social involutions and disasters (wars, foreign subjugations, natural catastrophes) but thinks that every human society finds its way to restart the ascending march.
Peña maintains that future-oriented improvement is the sense of human life, both individual and collective; so much so that a fundamental right of man is the right to have a better life—as far as possible. This general right encompasses particular welfare rights, such as the rights to food, to work, to have a dwelling, to mobility and so on, all of which ought to be considered dynamically.
One of the main claims this social philosophy advances is the rejection of the dichotomy between State and civil society, a contrived duality which he blames as the root of serious misconceptions. The primeval meaning of «Republic» being the State, «republicanism» primarily means giving some prominence to the public mission vested in the State, by promoting or favouring the government's intervention and the domain of resources publicly managed—provided, that is, that such a State has no hereditary ruler.
Peña has coined the pleonastic phrase «republican republicanism» to designate his political ideas, according to which the State's job is to pursue the common welfare by organizing the public services. Peña claims that there has never been a minimal state concerned with keeping law and order and nothing else. On the contrary, all states have undertaken a broad range of productive activities without which no private enterprise would have been workable at all.
Republican republicanism is thus a political philosophy tending to increase the scope of activities entrusted to the State, by setting up a planned economy with a powerful public sector and a gradual socialization of property; in the meanwhile private ownership has to be fraught with legal burdens for the common good. This doctrine borrows a number of ideas from the traditions of British Fabianism, French solidarism and German chair-socialism as well as the Spanish school of Krausist philosophers and lawyers who inspired the II Republic (1931–1939), whose Constitution he takes as a paradigm.
Peña's republicanism implies the rejection of all forms of market economy, including market socialism
. He contends that the State's patronage and intervention can alone bring a sense of directedness and unity of purpose, failing which the only practicable way is mercantile competition, with its dreary, ruthless consequences.
According to Peña, republican republicanism differs in four ways from civic neo-republicanism, or civicism. For one thing, it rejects monarchy, while civicism is not concerned over the political form of government. For another, it is statist, while civicists in the main agree with libertarians and liberals in viewing the public arena as a neutral ground within which private endeavours and undertakings are pursued by citizens, companies or other private clubs. Third, civicism promotes such private virtues as foster participation in public institutions, whereas Peña's republicanism recognizes the right of individuals not to be concerned with public issues. And fourth, civicism professes one value, freedom, understood as non-domination, while, as we have already seen, Peña espouses a plurality of values: thriving or welfare (akin to M. Nussbaum's flourishing), love, liberty, rationality, brotherhood, equality and living-together, owing to which normative and axiological contradictions are unavoidable. Dealing with those contradictions needs weighing and proportion (contradictorial gradualism bears out this proposal).
An essential component of Peña's republicanism is the proposal of an Earthian Republic. Peña views regional blocks as splits of the human family bringing about enmities and conflicts of interest rather than a fraternal union, which he champions on the ground of both prudential and axiological considerations.
The CSIC digital repository
Google Profile of Lorenzo Peña:
Profile of Lorenzo Peña at the site universia.net
Philosophy
Philosophy is the study of general and fundamental problems, such as those connected with existence, knowledge, values, reason, mind, and language. Philosophy is distinguished from other ways of addressing such problems by its critical, generally systematic approach and its reliance on rational...
, lawyer
Lawyer
A lawyer, according to Black's Law Dictionary, is "a person learned in the law; as an attorney, counsel or solicitor; a person who is practicing law." Law is the system of rules of conduct established by the sovereign government of a society to correct wrongs, maintain the stability of political...
, logic
Logic
In philosophy, Logic is the formal systematic study of the principles of valid inference and correct reasoning. Logic is used in most intellectual activities, but is studied primarily in the disciplines of philosophy, mathematics, semantics, and computer science...
ian and political thinker
Political philosophy
Political philosophy is the study of such topics as liberty, justice, property, rights, law, and the enforcement of a legal code by authority: what they are, why they are needed, what, if anything, makes a government legitimate, what rights and freedoms it should protect and why, what form it...
. His rationalism
Rationalism
In epistemology and in its modern sense, rationalism is "any view appealing to reason as a source of knowledge or justification" . In more technical terms, it is a method or a theory "in which the criterion of the truth is not sensory but intellectual and deductive"...
is a neo-Leibnizian approach both in metaphysics
Metaphysics
Metaphysics is a branch of philosophy concerned with explaining the fundamental nature of being and the world, although the term is not easily defined. Traditionally, metaphysics attempts to answer two basic questions in the broadest possible terms:...
and law
Law
Law is a system of rules and guidelines which are enforced through social institutions to govern behavior, wherever possible. It shapes politics, economics and society in numerous ways and serves as a social mediator of relations between people. Contract law regulates everything from buying a bus...
.
Life
Lorenzo Peña was born in AlicanteAlicante
Alicante or Alacant is a city in Spain, the capital of the province of Alicante and of the comarca of Alacantí, in the south of the Valencian Community. It is also a historic Mediterranean port. The population of the city of Alicante proper was 334,418, estimated , ranking as the second-largest...
, Spain
Spain
Spain , officially the Kingdom of Spain languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Spain's official name is as follows:;;;;;;), is a country and member state of the European Union located in southwestern Europe on the Iberian Peninsula...
, on August 29, 1944. Persecuted by Franco
Francisco Franco
Francisco Franco y Bahamonde was a Spanish general, dictator and head of state of Spain from October 1936 , and de facto regent of the nominally restored Kingdom of Spain from 1947 until his death in November, 1975...
's regime, his mother (born in the Madrid Royal Palace in 1911) was not allowed to return to the Spanish capital city until 1952.
In Madrid Peña was taught Greek and Indoeuropean linguistics by the renowned Spanish philologist Francisco Rodríguez-Adrados and ethics by J.L. Aranguren.
Upon becoming a political activist in February 1962, he was forced to emigrate in the spring 1965. In early 1969 he married his class-mate María Teresa Alonso in Meudon
Meudon
Meudon is a municipality in the southwestern suburbs of Paris, France. It is in the département of Hauts-de-Seine. It is located from the center of Paris.-Geography:...
(France
France
The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...
); the couple have been living together ever since. While staying in Paris he was a disciple of the French historian Pierre Vilar and he witnessed the upheaval of May 1968. He gave up all clandestine activities in 1972. After spending 18 years in exile, he went back to Spain in 1983.
Career
In 1974 Peña was awarded hisphilosophy degree (licenciatura) from the PUCE (the Ecuadorian Pontifical University in Quito
Quito
San Francisco de Quito, most often called Quito , is the capital city of Ecuador in northwestern South America. It is located in north-central Ecuador in the Guayllabamba river basin, on the eastern slopes of Pichincha, an active stratovolcano in the Andes mountains...
), with a thesis on Saint Anselm's ontological proof of God's existence, his adviser being Julio C. Terán, S.J., who taught him hermeneutics. He then spent four years in Liège, Belgium, (1975–1979) where, under the supervision of Paul Gochet, he wrote his dissertation on a system of contradictorial (paraconsistent) logic. At that time he was also granted a complementary degree in American Studies by Liège University.
Upon receiving his Ph.D. in 1979, he came back to Ecuador. He was a professor at the PUCE for four years and later on, after returning to Spain, at León University for another three years. In 1987 he was appointed senior scientific researcher at the CSIC (Spain's main academic research institution).
He spent six months in Canberra
Canberra
Canberra is the capital city of Australia. With a population of over 345,000, it is Australia's largest inland city and the eighth-largest city overall. The city is located at the northern end of the Australian Capital Territory , south-west of Sydney, and north-east of Melbourne...
as a visiting scholar (1992–1993), under the guidance of the late Richard Sylvan
Richard Sylvan
Richard Sylvan was a philosopher, logician, and environmentalist.- Biography :Sylvan was born Francis Richard Routley in Levin, New Zealand, and his early work is cited with this surname...
, and was a colleague of Philip Pettit
Philip Pettit
Philip Noel Pettit is an Irish philosopher and political theorist. He is Laurence Rockefeller University Professor of Politics and Human Values at Princeton University...
at the philosophy department of the Australian National University. Later on he shifted his research orientation to the philosophy of law. He became a lawyer by earning an M.L. (DEA) from Madrid Autonomous University in 2007. He then affiliated with the Madrid Bar. He reached the highest academic professional level (Research Professor) in 2006.
Peña is the founder and Editor of the digital journal
http://www.sorites.orgSORITES and the leader of JuriLog (Logical Jurisprudence), the
http://jurilog.es
logic-and-law research group at the CSIC, which is carrying out an inquiry into nomological concepts and values.
Ontophantics
Ontophantics is the system of philosophical conceptions developed by Peña in the years 1974–1995 (which do not necessarily coincide with those he has developed in recent years).Although ontophantics is essentially a metaphysical doctrine, its starting point was a methodological approach through the philosophy of language, based on a realist semiotic theory to the effect that what is shown by language is also said (as against the Tractarian dichotomy), namely reality or being. Rather than regarding sentences and states of affairs in a static way, as logical atomists have done, ontophantics looks upon them dynamically, as transitions or processes. To utter a statement is not a mere series of successive actions of uttering the sentence's components but a transit from one saying into another along a temporal dimension. Likewise facts are nontemporal transitions consisting in a relation passing from one thing to another.
Since all passages seem to be subject to Zeno's paradox of the arrow, a
paraconsistent logic
Paraconsistent logic
A paraconsistent logic is a logical system that attempts to deal with contradictions in a discriminating way. Alternatively, paraconsistent logic is the subfield of logic that is concerned with studying and developing paraconsistent systems of logic.Inconsistency-tolerant logics have been...
is resorted to in order to solve the puzzle. Instead of blaming contradictions on thought or language Peña ascribes them to reality by embracing a non-classical logic
Non-classical logic
Non-classical logics is the name given to formal systems which differ in a significant way from standard logical systems such as propositional and predicate logic. There are several ways in which this is done, including by way of extensions, deviations, and variations...
.
Another feature of ontophantics is the rejection of all forms of essentialism in the sense of considering attributions of being-so independent of assertions of being or existence—an opinion Peña attributes to Aristotle and Meinong. Peña's existence-oriented ontology identifies each entity with a fact, its existence. Ontological truth is also identified with existence, which is a reduplicative property. Ontophantics follows Frege's view of sentences as names of objects, but in this case the objects under consideration are states of affairs. From a linguistic perspective phenomena of nominalization are thus gone into from an outlook which eliminates any categorical cleavages. Such a metaphysical theory is strongly Platonistic. Ontophantics is also a modal realism, which takes reality to be all-encompassing, and thus comprising non-actual worlds.
Ontophantics contains a holistic theory of knowledge influenced by Gonseth and Quine, considering the cleavage between analytic and synthetic judgments a matter of degree. This epistemological holism is a sort of empirical coherentism, for which the task of human knowledge is to set up theories, to confront them with experience taken as a whole and to gradually modify them. Not only foundationalism of any kind is rejected but reliabilism is not accepted either, since no procedure is to be unconditionally trusted come what may.
Peña rehabilitates induction as a sound ground even for logical truth
Logical truth
Logical truth is one of the most fundamental concepts in logic, and there are different theories on its nature. A logical truth is a statement which is true and remains true under all reinterpretations of its components other than its logical constants. It is a type of analytic statement.Logical...
s (he follows the outdated opinion of J. S. Mill). The choice among alternative logical systems has to be made in accordance with plausible criteria, one of which is fitness with the best explanation of available evidence, thus resorting to an optimization postulate, which in turn gets circularly warranted by its epistemological fruitness.
That optimization postulate is a rationality ideal which also provides a ground for assuming God's existence. Peña's first published book, The coincidence of opposites in God (Quito, 1981), was a discussion of the proofs of God's inexistence canvassed in the analytical philosophy of religion. He broached the question through a combination of a contradictorial logic and a non-standard set theory (in a way a mirror reversion of Quine's ML system), which regards infinite entities as not being subject to the principle of separation in virtue of which a thing is comprised by the set of entities with a certain characteristic only to the extent it has that characteristic. In that book he adopted determinism and rejected free will, a position he has maintained ever since, using it as a lever while grappling with issues in the philosophy of law.
Contradictorial gradualism
As against other persuasions in paraconsistent logic (such as relevantism and the Brazilian school), the paraconsistent treatment developed by Peña, which belongs in the fuzzy family founded by Lofti Zadeh, regards true contradictions as situations wherein a state of affairs enjoys only partial existence. His approach to fuzziness deviates from Zadeh's main-stream orthodoxy in rejecting alethic maximalism and so embracing the principle of excluded middle, regarding all intermediaries as degrees of both truth and falseness, being and non-being (Plato's influence is discernable here).Transitive logic
In order to clarify his philosophical proposal Peña has set up several systems of sentential and quantificational logic which he calls «transitive logic», TL, as partial implementations of his programme. TL is characterized by a couple of negations, one strong («not at all»), which has all classical properties, and a weak one (a mere «not»), which is degree-sensitive. The fragment of TL without strong negation is a non-conservative extension of Anderson and Belnap's logic of relevance, E, (by adding the funnel principle, namely that either A implies B or else A; in other words, what is not true at all implies anything). Transitive implication is partly similar to relevant implication (although much stronger), but its underlying philosophical motivation is entirely different, since it is read «to the extent [at least] that … ». The fragment of TL without weak negation and the implication operator is classical logic. TL is thus a logical blend or rather a crossbreed.Peña's plan to investigate the grounds of his logical system as a nonclassical combinatory logic has thus far remained programmatic, but the combinatory account fits his metaphysical approach.
Cumulativism
Cumulativism is Peña's philosophical orientation as developed from 1996 onwards. Cumulativism is contradictorial gradualism with an added emphasis on six hitherto partly implicit components of his approach: (1) All transitions are either continuous or at least supervene on underlying continuous mutations, going through successive steps; hence change is always slow and implies a succession of stages, each of which keeps many qualities of the previous stage. (2) All transitions are either aggregations or disaggregations (processes of sedimentation or erosion) since cumulation, gathering, is reality's most prominent feature (ontophantics had already conceived of all entities as sets, but now the principle of togetherness is made the mainstay of the philosophical system). (3) Metaphysical isolationism is avoided by espousing collectivism both in metaphysics and political philosophy. (4) A programme of conceptual flexibilization is proposed, by which concepts become soft, fluid, with shifting borders. (5) The gatherings or clusters this approach advances are called cumuli, cumulations -- so as not to be mistaken for sets in the sense of standard set-theory—the main idea remaining that not all things congregated by a cluster necessarily share the cluster's defining characterictic (and, more generally, the Meinongian description principle fails, namely that the entity which is thus-and-so is indeed thus-and-so). (6) As a compendium, cumulativism is taken to be the philosophy of conjunction: A-and-B is a conjunctive state of affairs which exists to the extent A and B exist. A-and-B's own properties supervene on those held by A and B.Juridicial logic
Peña's work on deontic logicDeontic logic
Deontic logic is the field of logic that is concerned with obligation, permission, and related concepts. Alternatively, a deontic logic is a formal system that attempts to capture the essential logical features of these concepts...
began short after his 1979 Ph.D. diss. The first paper he published on the issue appeared in 1988. At that time, he essentially clung to von Wright's standard approach, departing from it only by introducing degrees and admitting normative contradictions or antinomies. He soon became dissatisfied with that scheme which proved to be incompatible with serious applications of deontic logic to the practice of legal reasoning. He found out the flaw was to think of deontic logic as a species of the genus modal logic by stressing the similarities between duty and necessity, and between licitness and possibility.
The underlying mistake, according to Peña, is a wrong metaphysical assumption which denies the existence of deontic states of affairs connected by implications. That denial pushes deontic logicians to conceive of deontic logic as the logic of duty-compliances. Thus if A necessarily implies B, standard deontic logic believes that the duty to do A implies a duty to do B—this is the rule of logical closure. That rule is one of the first dogmas waived by Peña's deontic approach.
Peña was thus prompted to produce a new system of deontic logic, Juridicial Logic, or JL, combining a number of particularities which make it unique:
- All standard deontic principles are relinquished except Bentham's law (namely that what is obligatory is also licit). More precisely, the two following rules are abandoned: logical closure and the usual distribution rules (the obligatoriness of A-and-B implies the obligatoriness of A and that of B, and conversely).
- Deontic detachment is embraced: If it is licit that either A or B, and in fact A happens not to be realized at all, then B is licit; and the same applies for obligatoriness. (Some restrictions are needed in order to avoid paradoxes.)
- The principle of co-licitness is espoused, namely that, to the extent A is licit and so is B, A-and-B is licit too.
- New deontic principles are introduced by resorting to two non-standard operators of hindering and causation: the causal effects of licit causes are licit and thwarting a licit behaviour is forbidden.
- A non-standard rule of liberty is added: if the prohibition of A cannot be proved, then A must be taken to be licit.
- Degrees of licitness and obligation are accounted for by apposite axioms involving implication; in particular a proportionality axiom is introduced linking degrees of realization of a factual antecedent with degrees of licitness or obligatoriness of the normative consequence.
Peña claims that the valid principles of logic in general and deontic logic in particular are found by induction, through a circular holistic process. It is only by studying normative reasoning as it really happens in legal practice that sanitized sets of axioms and inference rules can be devised and then subject to the acid test of applicability.
Pluralistic axiology
Peña has proposed a pluralistic axiology in order to deal with the debate between deontological and consequentialist approaches in ethics.Peña classifies ethical theories into two groups: internalism and externalism
Internalism and externalism
Internalism and externalism are two opposing ways of explaining various subjects in several areas of philosophy. These include human motivation, knowledge, justification, meaning and truth. The distinction arises in many areas of debate with similar but distinct meanings...
, the former valuing conducts according to intrinsic features. Externalism comes in two ways: antecedentalism and consequentialism
Consequentialism
Consequentialism is the class of normative ethical theories holding that the consequences of one's conduct are the ultimate basis for any judgment about the rightness of that conduct...
. There are two sorts of consequentialism: monistic and pluralistic, the former maintaining that there is one ethical property practical consequences of actions must have in order to render the action ethically valuable. Utilitarianism is a monist consequentialism.
Peña is a pluralist. He is inclined to a pluralistic consequentialism, but his approach can be taken to transcend the very dichotomy, since, once no unique criterion is looked for, actions ought to be assessed in a number of ways according to different values, some of which are not necessarily teleological. Since the approach is gradualistic, ethical valuations are taken to be scales with infinitely many degrees combined in infinitely complex compositions. Withal, the nearer a causal consequence of our action is, the higher its ethical significance. Peña implements ethical pluralistic gradualism through his paraconsistent fuzzy logic: actions can be regarded as both good and bad, better in certain respects and worse in other respects.
As for the units of behaviour to be assessed, Peña's ideas are close to virtue ethics in that he thinks isolated actions are generally too narrow unities to be reasonably appraised, although a whole course of life is too broad. Something in-between is a more adequate candidate, which means a span of one's life evincing a continuation of purposes, choices and habits.
Peña admits that a pluralistic axiology faces a serious difficulty, namely that it provides no clear guidance for action, unless there is an objective all-things-considered perspective. He claims that sometimes there is no such perspective and that in those cases choices are justified by one's previous allegiance to the prevalence of certain values. But even when an all-things-considered outlook is warranted, its existence does not mean that contradictory valuations are merely prima facie. Thus ethical contradictions cannot be evaded.
Social evolutionism
As against all who claim that progress is a vapid concept and that there is no continuous improvement along history, Peña's philosophy of history argues that progress is the necessary outcome of our cultural rationality—weak and partial though it is—thanks to which any human society will tend to ameliorate its welfare by blending the scattered wisdom of its members into a combined collective purposive intelligence, thus increasing, little by little, its social accumulation of material and intellectual assets, establishing more workable, reliable and socially acceptable laws and making distribution practices more consonant with the public interest.Human progress being continuous, no historic leaps are possible and so there is no objective ground for any periodization. Any delimitation of epochs is a matter of mere convenience. The law of human progress is not to be assimilated to grand schemes postulating a predetermined succession of ages, such as those of the Stoics, Vico, Hegel, A. Comte and K. Marx.
Peña's philosophy of history shares with those forerunners the view of human history as universal, both backwards and forwards. There is a common ancestry, which entails that at least a few elements of disparate human traditions go back to our shared origin. Those elements have been, time and again, strengthened by the mutual borrowing of concepts, techniques, institutions and procedures. There is also a common destination, owing to our shared Planet and a converging tendency, which needs no mysterious invisible hand but results from objective constraints.
Peña's philosophy of history acknowledges collective minds, which supervene on individual minds. No society can exist without a common memory and common plans of living-together and reaching common aims (which does not mean that all members of the body politic share those feelings; Peña rejects any mandatory imposition of beliefs or values).
Peña does not deny the existence of historic breaks caused by social involutions and disasters (wars, foreign subjugations, natural catastrophes) but thinks that every human society finds its way to restart the ascending march.
Peña maintains that future-oriented improvement is the sense of human life, both individual and collective; so much so that a fundamental right of man is the right to have a better life—as far as possible. This general right encompasses particular welfare rights, such as the rights to food, to work, to have a dwelling, to mobility and so on, all of which ought to be considered dynamically.
Republican republicanism
Peña's legal philosophy is a natural-law theory deriving from Aquinas's conception of law as an ordinance of reason for the common good. Some of those ordinances are promulgated by legislators by means of certain speech acts; others, natural-law norms, stem from the very nature of social relations. As against social-covenant views, Peña regards human beings as naturally social, antecedently banded together into a community under an established authority, whose duty is to pursue the public interest. Peña claims that inhabitants of the land enter a quasi-contract by growing up within society and benefiting from established social institutions, thus committing themselves to contribute to the common good and to subordinate their particular interests to those of society as a whole and to the needs of such people as are worse-off.One of the main claims this social philosophy advances is the rejection of the dichotomy between State and civil society, a contrived duality which he blames as the root of serious misconceptions. The primeval meaning of «Republic» being the State, «republicanism» primarily means giving some prominence to the public mission vested in the State, by promoting or favouring the government's intervention and the domain of resources publicly managed—provided, that is, that such a State has no hereditary ruler.
Peña has coined the pleonastic phrase «republican republicanism» to designate his political ideas, according to which the State's job is to pursue the common welfare by organizing the public services. Peña claims that there has never been a minimal state concerned with keeping law and order and nothing else. On the contrary, all states have undertaken a broad range of productive activities without which no private enterprise would have been workable at all.
Republican republicanism is thus a political philosophy tending to increase the scope of activities entrusted to the State, by setting up a planned economy with a powerful public sector and a gradual socialization of property; in the meanwhile private ownership has to be fraught with legal burdens for the common good. This doctrine borrows a number of ideas from the traditions of British Fabianism, French solidarism and German chair-socialism as well as the Spanish school of Krausist philosophers and lawyers who inspired the II Republic (1931–1939), whose Constitution he takes as a paradigm.
Peña's republicanism implies the rejection of all forms of market economy, including market socialism
Market socialism
Market socialism refers to various economic systems where the means of production are either publicly owned or cooperatively owned and operated for a profit in a market economy. The profit generated by the firms system would be used to directly remunerate employees or would be the source of public...
. He contends that the State's patronage and intervention can alone bring a sense of directedness and unity of purpose, failing which the only practicable way is mercantile competition, with its dreary, ruthless consequences.
According to Peña, republican republicanism differs in four ways from civic neo-republicanism, or civicism. For one thing, it rejects monarchy, while civicism is not concerned over the political form of government. For another, it is statist, while civicists in the main agree with libertarians and liberals in viewing the public arena as a neutral ground within which private endeavours and undertakings are pursued by citizens, companies or other private clubs. Third, civicism promotes such private virtues as foster participation in public institutions, whereas Peña's republicanism recognizes the right of individuals not to be concerned with public issues. And fourth, civicism professes one value, freedom, understood as non-domination, while, as we have already seen, Peña espouses a plurality of values: thriving or welfare (akin to M. Nussbaum's flourishing), love, liberty, rationality, brotherhood, equality and living-together, owing to which normative and axiological contradictions are unavoidable. Dealing with those contradictions needs weighing and proportion (contradictorial gradualism bears out this proposal).
An essential component of Peña's republicanism is the proposal of an Earthian Republic. Peña views regional blocks as splits of the human family bringing about enmities and conflicts of interest rather than a fraternal union, which he champions on the ground of both prudential and axiological considerations.
Conclusion
Peña's approach pertains to analytical philosophy in all essential traits: argumentation style, reasoning methods, privileged interlocutors, recourse to logical tools and adopting the linguistic turn—even though the role of language fades in his recent work. Yet it is also a peculiar, even idiosyncratic thought which owes much to influences quite diverse from the Anglo-Saxon main-stream, some of which most analytical philosophers are not acquainted with, esp. those in the province of law and jurisprudence, including the Spanish republican tradition.Co-Workers
Lorenzo Peña's two main co-workers are:- http://www.dilemata.net his Spanish colleague at the CSIC, Txetxu Ausín, editor of DILEMATA
- http://www.equaguia.com/mv/ the Ecuadorian Marcelo Vásconez, Ph.D. from Louvain University and philosophy professor at the University of Cuenca (Ecuador)
Writings by Lorenzo Peña
- http://www.plazayvaldes.es/libro/estudios-republicanos/1291/ 2009. Estudios Republicanos: Contribución a la filosofía política y jurídica, México/Madrid: Plaza y Valdés. ISBN 978-84-96780-53-8.
- 2007. «Entidades culturales», in El mobiliario del mundo: Ensayos sobre ontología y metafísica, ed. by Guillermo Hurtado & Óscar Nudler, México: UNAM, pp. 317–342. ISBN 970-32-3783-5.
- 2007. «El cumulativismo», in Pluralidad de la filosofía analítica, ed. by David P. Chico & Moisés Barroso, Madrid-México: Plaza y Valdés, pp. 343–386. ISBN 978-84-96780-02-6.
- 2006. Los derechos positivos: Las demandas justas de acciones y prestaciones, (co-edited with Txetxu Ausín). México/Madrid: Plaza y Valdés. ISBN 978-84-934395-5-2.
- 2000. «Paraconsistent Deontic Logic with Enforceable Rights», in Frontiers of Paraconsistent Logic ed. by D. Batens, Ch. Mortensen, G. Priest & J.-P. van Bendegem. Baldford (England): Research Studies Press Ltd. (RSP) [Logic and Computation Series]. ISBN 086302532 , pp. 29–47. [Coauthored with Txetxu Ausín.]
- 1999. «The Coexistence of Contradictory Properties in the Same Subject According to Aristotle», Apeiron 32/3, pp. 203–30. ISSN 0003-6390.
- 1998. «C1-Compatible Transitive Extensions of System CT», Logique et Analyse, Nº 161-162-163, pp. 135–143.
- 1993. «In Defense of Full-Scale Planning», Science and Society 57/2 (New York: Guilford Press), pp. 204–13. ISSN 0036-8237.
- 1993. Introducción a las lógicas no-clásicas. México: UNAM Pp. 240. ISBN 968-36-3451-6.
- 1992. Hallazgos filosóficos. Salamanca: Ediciones de la Universidad Pontificia de Salamanca. ISBN 84-7299-289-6. Pp. 363.
- 1991. Rudimentos de lógica matemática. Madrid: CSIC. Pp. vi+324. ISBN 84-000-7156-5.
- 1990. «Partial Truth, Fringes and Motion: Three Applications of a Contradictorial Logic». Studies in Soviet Thought, vol 37 (Dordrecht: Kluwer), pp. 83–122. ISSN 0039-3797.
- 1989. «Verum et ens conuertuntur: The Identity between Truth and Existence within the Framework of a Contradictorial Modal Set-Theory», in Paraconsistent Logic: Essays on the Inconsistent, ed. by G. Priest, R. Routley & J. Norman. Munich: Philosophia Verlag, pp. 563–612 ISBN 3-88405-058-3.
- 1987. Fundamentos de ontología dialéctica. Madrid: Siglo XXI. Pp. 427. ISBN 84-323-0606-1.
- 1985. El ente y su ser: un estudio lógico-metafísico. León: Servicio de Publicaciones de la Universidad de León. Pp. 568. ISBN 84-600-3973-0.
- 1981. La coincidencia de los opuestos en Dios. Quito: Educ (Ediciones de la Universidad Católica). Pp. 568. ISBN-9978-44-473-4.
External links
- http://lp.jurid.net Lorenzo Peña's home page (http://lp.jurid.net)
- http://www.sorites.org SORITES (http://www.sorites.org)
- http://digital.csic.es/handle/10261/10/items-by-author?author=Pe%C3%B1a%2C+Lorenzo
The CSIC digital repository
Google Profile of Lorenzo Peña:
- http://csic.academia.edu/LorenzoPe%C3%B1a Profile of Lorenzo Peña at the site academia.edu
- http://biblioteca.universia.net/autor/Pe%C3%B1a,%20Lorenzo.html
Profile of Lorenzo Peña at the site universia.net
- http://www.plazayvaldes.es/autor/lorenzo-pena/725/ His current publisher's site