Gustavo Bueno

Born in 1924, Gustavo Bueno is a Spanish philosopher still very active publishing books and papers and giving lectures. Considered by the Times of London as "Spain’s top philosopher", he is the main proponent of the philosophical system known as philosophical materialism. Philosophical materialism excludes any possibility of spiritual life (gods, spirits, souls) without reference to organic life; its ontology and theories of knowledge, however, are not based on mechanical materialism or dualistic historical materialism, but rather on a rich interpretation of the main systems defended by different traditions in the history of philosophy. Philosophical materialism has been applied to numerous other fields in dozens of books, papers and talks by Bueno and others.
 

Contents:
• Biography • General view of philosophical materialism • The ontological bases of philosophical materialism • Essential atheism • Matter cannot be reduced to corporeal matter • Philosophical materialism through materialist anthropology • Philosophical materialism beyond Gustavo Bueno • Selected bibliography
 

 
Biography

Born in 1924 in Santo Domingo de la Calzada, Spain, Gustavo Bueno received his doctorate in 1948 from the University of Madrid. From 1949, he was principal of an all-girls high school in Salamanca, Spain. In 1960, Bueno was appointed to the chair of philosophy at the University of Oviedo, working with the title of Professor of Foundations of Philosophy and History of Philosophical Systems. In the 1970's, after having published the seminal Materialist Essays, Bueno and a team of assistants received a grant from the Juan March Foundation to develop a "gnoseological theory of human sciences". Written up in six volumes, this unpublished work contained the nucleus of Bueno's materialist theory of science. Since his 1998 retirement from the University, Bueno has worked mainly at the foundation that carries his name, Fundación Gustavo Bueno, authoring numerous books and papers on a wide variety of topics. A philosophical school has been evolving around his system –philosophical materialism– which itself has come to represent an important landmark in the field of philosophy, especially in Spanish-speaking countries.

 
General view of philosophical materialism

From an early period, Bueno was especially drawn to logic and the philosophical analysis of the human sciences. During the Franco regime (1939-1975) he was politically close to the Spanish political left and studied Marxist philosophy with a critical view: philosophical materialism was in part triggered by Bueno's critique of Marxist monism. Another important source of Bueno's philosophy was Spanish scholasticism, which Bueno had studied from an atheist's point of view from the early 1950's onwards.

In Bueno's view, only when arts, religions, techniques (including politics), sciences and technologies –"first grade knowledges"– have been sufficiently developed can philosophy then appear as "second grade knowledge", transcendental in relation to "first grade knowledge" (in the sense that it permeates various kinds of knowledges). Thus philosophy is far from being an absolute knowledge (metaphysics), a science (logic, epistemology) or the "mother of sciences" that would not have a specific role once sciences have become sufficiently mature.

Bueno offers an operational description of philosophy (as opposed to etymological or psychological definitions, such as "love of wisdom"): philosophy is the discipline that works with ideas. Ideas, however, do not descend from heaven nor emerge spontaneously from the human soul; they are worldly and objective products of human reality. How, then, are they produced? Provided that the above-mentioned first grade knowledges produce concepts, ideas spring from contradictions and incommensurabilities among different concepts, or among different regions of concepts.

Therefore, since ideas depend on concepts, it is to be expected that the more developed the "first grade" concepts are (technologies, politics, sciences), the more developed ideas will be. As quotidian reality becomes more and more complex, instruments for a philosophical and systematic approach to ideas must be revised and completed. Any truly philosophical system has to be able to address and interpret both that increasingly complex reality and the various systems offered in the past. Philosophical reasoning, as Plato taught, is dialectic and never dogmatic, in that it cannot just "describe" reality as if it had a direct relation with it, but needs to refer controversially to interpretations of the concepts with which human beings re-organize the world.

With these methodological characteristics, philosophical materialism postulates itself as one of the most powerful systems currently at work. Even today, when scholars claim to have abandoned "grand narratives" and systematic views, ideas still need to be related to other ideas in order to be understood and, as such, each of us inevitably has an ontology and a theory of knowledge, no matter how basic and implicit. For example, people trying to make sense of their own religious feelings need to have ideas (no matter how simple) about humans, divine entities, and the relationships between the two. The same is true for someone in a pub or at work trying to justify a democratically elected law - they would probably need to mention free will, representation, nation, etc. All of these ideas are intertwined, thus forming systems, however weak or strong. A criterion for determining the power of a system of ideas is its capacity to relate to the phenomena it is trying to organize. The Platonic understanding of philosophy as the process of regressus from the phenomena to the ideas and progressus of these ideas back towards the phenomena is still a valid definition, and one that can be used to distinguish metaphysical or idealist theories from materialist ones, for which "saving the phenomena" will always be a priority.

For more than 40 years, philosophical materialism has been and is still being built in reference to the sciences (history, biology, physics, anthropology, etc.) and the history of philosophy. As reality changes, so too must the system, and so it is ever evolving. Philosophical materialism has undergone important modifications and extensions as it deals with these worldly changes. The (official) birth of ethology as a scientific discipline in 1973 or the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 are just some examples of these changes in the world, in reality –important changes that have obliged a reassessment of the system (these two changes were reflected on the books El animal divino and Primer ensayo sobre las categorías de las ciencias políticas, respectively: see bibliography).

 
The ontological bases of philosophical materialism

In any event, philosophical materialism maintains its coherence as a system. Its essential core was expressed in Bueno's book (1972), Ensayos materialistas: philosophical materialism means ontological determinism and pluralism. As the founder of academic philosophy, and from the viewpoint of his theory of knowledge, Plato defended in his Sophist the principle of symploke, the same principle that Bueno uses to support both determinism and pluralism: "nothing is isolated from everything else, but not everything is connected to everything else; otherwise, nothing could be known."

The first part of the principle of symploke justifies determinism and can be sustained nowadays by acknowledging how the different sciences need to refer to causal relations in their respective operational fields. Even random theories or theories of chaos do not destroy causal relations, but put them into a complex frame. In any event, the theory of causality employed by materialism differs from the classical theory of cause (employed by both Aristotle and Hume) in that it is triadic, since the material substratum is considered as a necessary part of any causal relation. The dyadic (or formalistic) theory of cause can be represented by the function y = f(x), while the triadic theory of cause defines the effect as the deviation of a given material scheme of identity, H. Thus, the effect Y results from the composition of H with the causal determinant, X. That is: Y = f (H, X).

In this scheme, the idea of a cause that causes itself, a causa sui, an idea often used to describe God (and, nowadays, some so-called "emergent" properties) is a philosophical absurdity (since the effect would need to be prior to the cause). Rather, determination always means co-determination among parts of reality. Therefore, from the point of view of philosophical materialism, the idea of form, as opposed to matter, must be re-interpreted as relations between material parts of a whole (philosophical materialism has developed a strong theory of wholes and parts). Finally, regarding non-corporeal materialities (see below), the idea of determination is a functional one (since causal relations only take place among bodies), useful to deny the possibility of self-determination and emergence. It is important to note that defending determinism is coherent with defending human freedom (as in Spinoza, Marx, and others), although it does imply a refutation of free will. In the same way, ontological determinism does not imply gnoseological determinism as sciences do not exhaust reality.

The second part of the principle of symploke justifies pluralism, which goes beyond just heterogeneity or multiplicity since it defends the disconnection among different areas, regions, or categories of reality. For instance, the different sciences appear as non-reducible to one another and often in conflict (given this backdrop, philosophy appears almost spontaneously to treat those areas affected by conflicts among sciences: history vs anthropology, neurology vs psychology, etc.), although they might share elements of their respective fields (it is possible, however, to know the list of American presidents without knowing how to decompose an atom).

 
Essential atheism

Pluralism, as opposed to monism (both substance monism: "everything comes from one single thing" and order monism: "everything follows one single plan"), turns the very idea of God into a contradiction, and prevents its modern substitution by the idea of Nature, which has been carried out in systems such as organicism, dialectical materialism, etc. Philosophical materialism, according to this and other arguments, claims to be able to prove the inexistence of God by the inexistence of its very idea: according to the ontological argument to prove God's inexistence ("if the idea of God is possible, God has to exist, since the idea of God implies God's existence") proving that the idea of God is impossible would be tantamount to saying that God cannot exist. But the idea of God is impossible, in that it is contradictory (for instance, the contradictions between an infinite being and a finite world, or the absurdity of an infinite consciousness). Thus, philosophical materialism sustains essential atheism, and not just existential atheism.

 
Matter cannot be reduced to corporeal matter

From this point of view, materialism is not understood as corporeal mechanism since the existence of non-corporeal materialities –such as undulatory energy, the distance between two bodies (which, in itself, is not a body), or kinship in a human society– has to be acknowledged. In special ontology, the idea of matter is divided into three genera, or kinds, that cannot survive alone but which nevertheless do not emanate from one another: physical matter, psychological matter and ideal matter. Spiritualism is impossible since a "separated consciousness" cannot exist or evolve without a body: perception, will, projects, and rationality are impossible to imagine without space, time and a biological body with a brain. Thus the different genera are necessarily connected, though not reducible to one another. In order to avoid metaphysical substantiation of these related genera of matter (as occurs in traditional scholastics –World, Soul, God– or as seen in Popper's ontology), Bueno labeled them M₁, M₂, and M₃, three different genera of Matter that together conform the world.

The world, such as we perceive it and operate with parts of it, needs human and animal subjects to preserve its morphology (the anthropic principle becomes a zootropic principle, against idealism) and it is through them that it is conformed. The idea of a transcendental ego (irreducible to an absolute spirit or to the sum of the different individual psychological selves) is thus necessary to the unity of the different genera that conform the universe. Since human subjects apply logical functors to their activities, such as logical addition, we can express their way of conforming the world through logical functors: E (ego) = M_i (World) = (M₁ ∪ M₂ ∪ M₃).

However, from the materialist point of view something would have to exist even if humans and animals were to disappear. This goes against the idealist or nihilist consequences that Fichte and other philosophers deduced from the discovery that an ego is necessary for the world to exist. Thus, as a negative idea defined by radical pluralism, Bueno reinterprets Wolff's general ontology as General Ontological Matter, or "M". "M" works against attempts to reduce reality to the world (M₁, M₂, M₃; even for Wolff, general ontology was devoted to common aspects of special ontology). The dangers of that common reduction can be seen not only in Fichte's idealism (and the nihilist consequences that some authors deduced from it), but also in the fact that it would be a return to monism: only by postulating M can M₁, M₂, and M₃ be conceived as necessarily linked but not reducible to one another. The different systems of philosophy that have existed since ancient Greece can be organized historically according to the importance given in them to these different aspects of ontology (M, E, M_i).

Throughout history, many other philosophers have seen the necessity of introducing something beyond the world: Anaximander's apeiron, the Neoplatonic One, Kant's thing-in-itself, Schopenhauer's Will, etc. By reinterpreting this tradition, philosophical materialism opposes formalism, which would give priority to one genera of matter over the other two: physical reductionism (as in some versions of historical materialism), psychological reductionism (or spiritualism or idealism), and essentialism (as in some interpretations of Platonism).

 
Philosophical materialism through materialist anthropology

Some of the most important aspects of philosophical materialism can be briefly –and in a very simplified manner– presented following the three axes that, in Bueno's theory, organize anthropological space. The concept of anthropological space is useful to refer to an area of reality that contains heterogeneous material which, from a materialist perspective, must contain more than just human beings (unlike Fichte's or Gehlen's one-dimensional anthropological space). As the idea of God started to decline, and the concepts that had been developed to think about God started to be applied to humans and human societies, anthropological space was reduced to the dichotomy between nature and culture, a dichotomy so common to 19th and 20th century philosophy and anthropology. However, in Bueno's philosophy, the reduction of anthropological space to only two axes cannot be deduced from atheism. A third axis is operationally necessary to connect the other two axes and to establish a critique of any sort of idealism. This critique therefore assumes the possibility of intelligent and willing beings different from human beings. These ideas can be represented by the following diagrams:

To avoid interpretations that prioritize one of the axes over the others, figure I shows the axis integrating relations between men (H) surrounding the rest and figure II represents the axis (H) surrounded by the other two. Once again in order to avoid substantiation, Bueno named each of the axes according to their role in the diagram (instead of using the traditional ideas of world, soul and God): the circular axis contains human subjects and those instruments through which those subjects act upon one another (H); the radial axis gathers any non-personal entity conceptualized by human techniques (N); the angular axis (A) integrates subjects equipped with will and knowledge, which are alive in our real world but which nevertheless are not humans. This triadic conception opposes itself to the dualism that appears in some interpretations of Plato, Augustine, Descartes, Hegel, Marx or Husserl. The following presents the views that philosophical materialism holds with respect to each of the axes:

1. Considered from the radial axis, philosophical materialism presents itself as cosmological materialism since it criticizes the view that describes the world as a contingent effect of a creating God who is the owner of the world's destiny. Cosmological materialism also includes a materialist understanding of the categorial sciences, that is, gnoseological materialism (a theory on how scientific categories become closed, or produce a circle of immanence around scientific truths understood as synthetic identities between parts of a given scientific field).

2. From the circular axis perspective, philosophical materialism resembles historical materialism in the critique of historical idealism and its project of explaining human history as a product of an "autonomous consciousness" in which the future of humanity is planned. Despite this resemblance, philosophical materialism rejects any teleology of human history and re-interprets the history of humanity as the history of universal empires. In this sense, it turns Marx upside down (as Marx claimed to be doing with Hegel’s philosophical system).

3. From the point of view of the angular axis, philosophical materialism acquires the form of a religious materialism critically opposed to spiritualism (that conceives of gods, spirits and souls as incorporeal entities). Philosophical materialism argues that those entities are neither spiritual nor products of a hallucinated imagination or social alienation; on the contrary, they are interpreted as real, corporeal entities able to act as numen and which have coexisted with human beings for millennia. Historically, and following ethological sciences, animals equipped with will and knowledge seem to be a good incarnation of real numina. When considered as numina, animals are part of the angular axis, possessing will and knowledge without being human beings and having been represented in prehistoric caves, thus making possible the following materialist principle: "Man made God in the image and likeness of animals."

 
Philosophical materialism beyond Gustavo Bueno

In an increasingly complex society such as ours, philosophical systems are difficult to maintain and hardly fashionable. Nonetheless, numerous books, papers, and lectures by Bueno at universities, the Fundación Gustavo Bueno, and in the media have contributed to establish a school of thought that goes beyond its main author. It has become a relevant philosophical school which, in the last three decades, has produced more than thirty doctoral dissertations, numerous books and thousands of philosophical papers analyzing past and present problems related to the sciences, to politics, etc. Two journals –El Basilico (since 1978) and El Catoblepas (since 2002)– have established themselves as important vehicles for inquiries into philosophical materialism in the Spanish-speaking world.

The Nodulo Materialista Society, publisher of El Catoblepas, organizes conferences and seminars throughout the year in Spain and Mexico. Nodulo Materialista Mexico produces the TV show "Plaza de Armas" for the station Capital 21. Fundación Gustavo Bueno, for its part, produces the program "Teatro Crítico" and publishes dozens of videos on different topics available on the Internet.

In addition, the Proyecto de Filosofía en Español –linked to the Fundación Gustavo Bueno– is undertaking an ambitious project to publish and discuss online some thousands of philosophical texts produced in Spanish-speaking countries. It also translates classical Spanish scholastic texts, written originally in Latin, into Spanish.

 
Selected bibliography

In Spanish:

El papel de la filosofía en el conjunto del saber (Madrid: Ciencia Nueva, 1970). Discusses the meaning and role of "academic philosophy" as systematic philosophy, not necessarily the philosophy done at universities.

Etnología y utopía. Respuesta a la pregunta, ¿qué es etnología? (Valencia: Azanca, 1971). Defines ethnology from a philosophical point of view, attentive at its relations with other human sciences, such as anthropology or history.

Ensayos materialistas (Madrid: Taurus, 1972). Materialist ontology (pluralism and determinism) is presented.

Ensayo sobre las categorías de la Economía Política (Barcelona: La Gaya Ciencia, 1972). Offers a reinterpretation of Marxist economic theory and, more generally, of the connections of the history of political economy with the history of sciences and philosophy.

La metafísica presocrática (Oviedo: Pentalfa Ediciones, 1974). First part of a systematic history of philosophy as seen from philosophical materialism, which has also been applied to Descartes, Spinoza, Schelling, and others.

El individuo en la historia. Comentario a un texto de Aristóteles, Poética 1451b (Inaugural lecture of the academic year 1980-1981 at Universidad de Oviedo, 1980). A materialist –deterministic and pluralist– theory of history.

El animal divino. Ensayo de una filosofía materialista de la religión (Oviedo: Pentalfa Ediciones, 1985). A materialist theory of religion.

Nosotros y ellos. Ensayo de reconstrucción de la distinción etic/emic de Pike (Oviedo: Pentalfa, 1990). Analyses Pike's anthropological distinction etic/emic.

Primer ensayo sobre las categorías de las Ciencias Políticas (Logroño: Cultural Rioja, 1991). Bueno expounds his materialist theory of the state and political society.

Teoría del Cierre Categorial, 5 volumes, (Oviedo: Pentalfa Ediciones, 1991-93). A materialist theory of science, richly presented in five volumes, part of a bigger project. The sixth volume has been announced.

¿Qué es la ciencia? (Oviedo: Pentalfa Ediciones, 1995). Short essay on the nature of the sciences.

¿Qué es la filosofía? (Oviedo: Pentalfa Ediciones, 1995). Short essay on the meaning of philosophy.

El sentido de la vida (Oviedo: Pentalfa Ediciones, 1996). Contains an exposition of important moral and ethical questions from a materialist perspective.

El mito de la cultura. Ensayo de una filosofía materialista de la cultura (Barcelona: Editorial Prensa Ibérica, 1996). A best seller in Spain. Offers a systematic approach to the definition and history of the idea of culture.

España frente a Europa (Barcelona: Alba Editorial, 1999). From the perspective of philosophical materialism, Bueno develops a theory of the nature of Spain's identity and of its unity, as well as of the historical meaning of the Spanish Empire and its differences with the British Empire. It also discusses the limits of the European community.

Televisión: apariencia y verdad (Barcelona: Gedisa, 2000). Contains a philosophical theory of television, built around the central distinction between formal television and material television.

¿Qué es la Bioética? (Oviedo: Pentalfa Ediciones, 2001). Discusses the possibility of a neutral bioethics and presents a materialist theory of bioethics.

Telebasura y democracia (Barcelona: Ediciones B, 2002). Applies a materialist theory of television to the social and political debates about the quality of TV and its relation to democratic society.

El mito de la Izquierda (Barcelona: Ediciones B, 2003). Classification according to theories of state of the political left, in reference to the essential differences within its theories and generations.

Panfleto contra la democracia realmente existente (Madrid: La esfera de los libros, 2004). Bueno develops his theory of democracy in relation to his theory of the state (1991) and discusses the limits of the extended ideology of democracy.

La vuelta a la caverna: terrorismo, guerra y globalización (Barcelona: Ediciones B, 2004). Terrorism, war and "globalization" are discussed from the perspective of philosophical materialism.

El mito de la felicidad. Autoayuda para desengaño de los que buscan ser felices (Barcelona: Ediciones B, 2005). Destroys the idea of happiness as used in most literature and discusses its ontological, gnoseological, cultural, and political implications.
→ Translated by Brendan Burke: The Happiness Delusion. Debunking the Myth of Happiness (2019)

“Ensayo de una teoría antropológica de las instituciones”, El Basilisco, nº 37 (2005), 3-52. Sustains that what distinguishes human rationality from that of other animals is its institutional character. It offers an analysis and classification of institutions and of their role in anthropology.

España no es un mito, claves para una defensa razonada (Madrid: Temas de Hoy, 2005). Discusses the relations between unity, identity, existence and essence of the idea of Spain. Its last chapter, an interpretation of Don Quixote as the "Mirror of the Spanish nation" (available in English).

Zapatero y el Pensamiento Alicia, un presidente en el país de las maravillas (Madrid: Temas de Hoy, 2006). Various topics related to a tradition of thought inaugurated by Spanish Krausism and its influence in today's Spain.

La fe del ateo (Madrid: Temas de Hoy, 2007). Discusses the concepts of faith and atheism and applies philosophical materialism to different regions of reality: economics, television, art, etc.

El mito de la derecha (Madrid: Temas de Hoy, 2008). Investigates the history of the different currents of the political right in their relation to the political left analyzed elsewhere (2003).

"El puesto del Ego trascendental en el materialismo filosófico", El Basilisco, nº 40 (2009), 1-104. Reinterpretation of one of the fundamental ideas of all philosophical systems, including materialist ones –the self.

El fundamentalismo democrático (Madrid: Temas de Hoy, 2010). Amplifies the idea of democracy and analyzes its ideological "corruptions" from the point of view of the theory of bodies of philosophical materialism. It applies these analyses to the current situation in Spain.

In German:

"Ganzes / Teil" in Hans Jörg Sandkühler (Hrsg.), Europäische Enzyklopädie zu Philosophie und Wissenschaften (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1990), II: 219-231.

"Holismus" in Hans Jörg Sandkühler (Hrsg.), Europäische Enzyklopädie zu Philosophie und Wissenschaften (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1990), II: 552-559. Develops the materialist theory of wholes and parts.

"Materie", in Hans Jörg Sandkühler (Hrsg.), Europäische Enzyklopädie zu Philosophie und Wissenschaften, (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1990), III: 281-308. A brief reexposition of Ensayos Materialistas with some important qualifications.

Der Mythus der Kultur: Essay einer materialistischen Kulturphilosophie (Peter Land: Bern 2002). Offers a systematic approach to the definition and history of the idea of culture.

Philosophie heute. Antworten auf Fragen von Volker Rühle. Aus dem Spanischem übersetzt von Ruth Zimmerling. Volker Rühle (Hrsg.) Beiträge zur Philosophie aus Spanien. Freiburg/ München: Verlad Karl Alber, 1992. 55-92.

Some books by other authors that apply philosophical materialism:

Vidal Peña García, El materialismo de Spinoza, ensayo sobre la Ontología spinozista (Madrid: Ediciones de la Revista de Occidente, 1974). In the path inaugurated by La Metafísica Presocrática, a reinterpretation of Spinoza's philosophical system from the perspective of philosophical materialism.

David Alvargonzález, Ciencia y materialismo cultural (Madrid: UNED, 1989). Discusses methods and theories by best-selling anthropologist Marvin Harris and his cultural materialism as viewed from philosophical materialism.

Elena Ronzón, Antropología y antropologías. Ideas para una historia crítica de la Antropología española del siglo XIX (Oviedo: Pentalfa Ediciones, 1991). Discusses the gnoseological status of anthropology and the late history of Spanish anthropology.

Gustavo Bueno, Alberto Hidalgo y Carlos Iglesias, Symploké (Gijón: Ediciones Júcar, 1991). Complete handbook of philosophy.

David Alvargonzález, El sistema de clasificación de Linneo (Oviedo: Pentalfa Ediciones, 1992). Exploration of Porphyrian logic in Linnaeus’s system, understanding Darwin's theory as both a biological and logical revolution.

Meta (ed.), La filosofía de Gustavo Bueno (Madrid: Editorial Complutense, 1992). Different takes by various authors on philosophical materialism.

Alfonso Fernández Tresguerres, Los dioses olvidados: caza, toros y filosofía de la religión (Oviedo: Pentalfa, 1993). Applies religious materialism to the Spanish national "pastime": bullfighting, and its the relation with religion.

Felipe Giménez Pérez, La ontología materialista de Gustavo Bueno (Oviedo: Pentalfa, 1994). Summarizes some of the essential aspects of philosophical materialism.

Felicísimo Valbuena, Teoría general de la información (Madrid: Noesis, 1997). Applies gnoseological materialism to journalism and similar disciplines.

Pablo Huerga Melcón, La ciencia en la encrucijada. Análisis crítico de la célebre ponencia de Boris Mijailovich Hessen, Las raíces socioeconómicas de la mecánica de Newton, desde las coordenadas del materialismo filosófico (Oviedo: Biblioteca Filosofía en español, 1999). Reinterprets Boris Hessen´s seminal work in the history, sociology and philosophy of science.

Pelayo García Sierra, Diccionario filosófico. Manual de materialismo filosófico (Pentalfa: Oviedo, 2000). It is both a philosophy handbook and dictionary for the terminology of philosophical materialism.

Evaristo Álvarez Muñoz, Filosofía de las ciencias de la tierra: el cierre categorial de la geología (Oviedo: Pentalfa Ediciones, 2004). Applies gnoseological materialism to geology, studying the process of the closure of its most important theorems.

Patricio Peñalver, Francisco Giménez y Enrique Ujaldón, Filosofía y cuerpo. Debates en torno a la filosofía de Gustavo Bueno (Madrid: Ediciones Libertarias, 2005). Different takes by various authors on philosophical materialism.

José Manuel Rodríguez Pardo, El alma de los brutos en el entorno del Padre Feijoo (Oviedo: Pentalfa Ediciones, 2008). Investigates the place of animals in the philosophy of Benito Jerónimo Feijoo and his time.

David Alvargonzález, La clonación, la anticoncepción y el aborto en la sociedad biotecnológica (Oviedo: Pentalfa Ediciones, 2010). Discusses some ontological and ethical problems related to biotechnology and human bodies.