Talk:Xavier Zubiri

WikiProject class rating
This article was automatically assessed because at least one WikiProject had rated the article as start, and the rating on other projects was brought up to start class. BetacommandBot 04:37, 10 November 2007 (UTC)

Explanation of my gutting of this article
This morning, I received a message from a friend of mine. He is something of a junior expert in the field (he is studying for a PhD in philosophy), and he expressed concern that the entirety of the content was original research. He felt that the article looked like the work of someone who had done a dissertation on a little-known philosopher and then used wikipedia as a host for this.

When I came to see for myself, I found that the article was indeed in a terrible state. The whole body is unsourced, and has all the hallmarks of a personal reflective commentary, with no third-party sources to back it up. Moreover, the article has been tagged as such for nearly four years without the problems being addressed. As if this wasn't enough, the content was presented atrociously, with rank MoS problems and non-neutral wording. Frankly, I'm shocked that the article has in this state for as long as it has; it should have been gutted long ago. Having gutted the article, I'm now going to do two things:


 * 1) I'm going to get the friend I mentioned earlier to sign up for an account so he can come here to express his own concerns.
 * 2) I'm going to wait a few days for improvement, and then I may well take this to AfD, as I'm not convinced the philosopher himself is notable.

If anyone reads this and disagrees with my actions, feel free to improve the article, but please don't do so without observing WP:V or WP:OR. If the content is simply re-introduced without addressing any of the concerns I have raised, I will head to the relevant noticeboard to get this sorted. Regards Basa lisk  inspect damage⁄berate 13:24, 21 July 2012 (UTC)


 * I am the friend of Basalisk who brought this article to his attention. The article struck me as someone's own unsubstantiated view of the subject and contained no references. The philosopher in question does not even have an article on the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Hodigger (talk) 13:04, 22 July 2012 (UTC)

Unsourced material, again
I really don't think it's appropriate to include the huge, unsourced biography section. Neither do I think it is appropriate to make claims about his importance in the lead, seeing as we don't have anything to support such a claim.

My flatmate is a philosophy PhD student and he can't find anything on this guy, so I don't think we can write an article as in-depth as this right now. Basa lisk inspect damage⁄berate 16:13, 18 November 2012 (UTC)

Improved and extended the article
Dear Basalisk and Hodigger,

Thanks for your comments in this page. I have done some corrections on Xavier Zubiri's article. I started correcting without logging in. I apologize about this, but I was initially not using my computer, and I forgot to log in. But as soon as I came to my computer I logged in and continued working as Albtho (my wikipedia username). I am a social scientist, originally from El Salvador (in Latin America). I have also knowledge of Xavier Zubiri's philosophy. I have actually attended courses on Zubiri's philosophy directly from students of Ignacio Ellacuría, Xavier Zubiri's closest collaborator, and one of the main reasons Xavier Zubiri's thought has become so important in Latin American philosophy. It is sad to read that the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy does not have an entry on Xavier Zubiri. But it is hardly surprising. There are many important Ibero-American thinkers who do not receive the attention they deserve in US-American universities. However, I do not agree with the suggestion that the attention paid by US-American academics alone should be a measure of the importance of Xavier Zubiri's (or any other scholar's) philosophy worldwide. And remember that the English version of Wikipedia is read by people all over the world. Maybe the lack of attention to Zubiri in the US could be an indicator of the lack of knowledge about Xavier Zubiri's philosophy in the United States, as well as in much of the English-speaking world. But this is not the same as saying that Xavier Zubiri is not a philosopher who deserves to be mentioned as an important thinker. Quite the contrary. I would say that Xavier Zubiri's importance in Spain, Latin America and parts of Europe, coupled with the lack of knowledge about Zubiri's thought in Anglo-American philosophy are precisely the reasons why it becomes crucial to have a good article on Xavier Zubiri in the English version of Wikipedia. This article should explain well why this philosopher is important. Unfortunately, there are not many independent sources in English to reference this article. I have mostly used articles in Spanish. I trust that senior reviewers and the rest of the Wikipedia community can contribute to double-check these sources. You will see that all of my claims in the article are well documented. I have also included an external link with the most important articles on Xavier Zubiri since 1976 in "El País", Spain's biggest Newspaper. This web page can also serve to support the claim that Xavier Zubiri is an important Spanish philosopher. I also would like to encourage you to contextualize when you evaluate philosophers, and to go beyond what the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (or any other encyclopedia) prescribes. It is not that I have something against the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. I think that it is a very good encyclopedia, and I use it very often. Nevertheless, I am pretty sure that even the authors of this encyclopedia would not claim that it is an exhaustive source of philosophical knowledge. It is just an introduction and a very general summary of thought. And when it comes to philosophy, thought is just one part of the story. This thought must also be set in context. It is not the same to be a professional philosopher in Princeton, than to try to live from being an academic philosopher in fascist Spain. This is the context that Zubiri and many other Spanish academics had to face during and after the Spanish Civil War. Zubiri was lucky enough to be allowed to continue doing philosophy, and nothing more than studying, teaching and writing, thanks to the support of wealthy friends and his family. This was only enough for Zubiri to be known among limited intellectual circles in Spain, but unfortunately not in much of the rest of the world. Such context of civil war in Spain preceded a very similar situation some years later for certain European philosophers, who had to quit the safety of their academic careers because of the Second World War. Some of these philosophers were actually fortunate enough to escape to more peaceful conditions (like Hannah Arendt, who fled to the US). They continued their careers, and became well-known intellectual personalities. Unfortunately, many others, perhaps most of them, suffered another fate, and we do not know much about them today. We actually find an alternative, yet not so essentially different case in Xavier Zubiri's closest collaborator, Ignacio Ellacuría. Despite his excellent education from many of Europe's best philosophical and theological schools, Ellacuría did philosophy from war-torn El Salvador, in Central America. This did not grant him the fame that many other professors from Europe and North America achieved through their work. Ellacuria actually ended up being tragically murdered, because of the interests he challenged with his thought, much like Socrates. But that does not in itself make his philosophy any less valuable than that of other philosophers, who have had the fortune of living in a peaceful society. Likewise, the fact that philosophers were silenced or marginalized, for political reasons, should not make them any less worthy of an entry in Wikipedia, if what they said was important in their contexts. Therefore, we have to be open, and search for information in unusual places. The Internet facilitates this greatly. I write all this here, so that you can probably set this philosopher in perspective. Then it is easier to see why earlier authors of this article might have written things about Zubiri that can seem like exaggerations in the US-American academic situation of today. Of course, these things will always seem as an exaggeration when they are taken out of context. But I hope that my efforts with this entry have contributed to set certain things in place. I also hope that the article is better written and more informative. If not, let me know how to improve it. Thanks again for your work and good observations! User:Albtho (talk) 22:08, 18 October 2013 (UTC)

Update WikiProject class rating
This article is still rated as "Start-class" in the quality scale. This means that the article is considered as "developing, but which is quite incomplete and, most notably, lacks adequate reliable sources". Although I would say that the article is still "developing" (hard to say when it isn't), I do not think it's fair to say that it lacks adequate reliable sources as it is now. Is it possible to update this rating?User:Albtho (talk) 18:23, 21 October 2013 (UTC)

External links modified
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