User:Srhb2023/Miguel Espinoza Verdejo

Miguel Espinoza Verdejo (born in Antofagasta, Chile, on 16 December 1946) is a Chilean-French philosopher of nature and science. He is the author of a vast body of work in his domain that emanates from his three scientific-philosophical cultures: Hispanic, Anglo-Saxon and French.

Biography

He was born in Antofagasta, Chile, on 16 December 1946. He attended primary and secondary school in Antofagasta, Chile, first the Colegio Corazón de María and then the Colegio San Luis. He was awarded The Latin American Scholarship Programme of American Universities (L.A.S.P.A.U.) which allowed him to obtain a Bachelor of Arts in Philosophy in 1970 at Williams College, Massachusetts.That year he was a recipient of The Latin American Scholarship Program of American Universities Award. In 1974 he obtained a Ph. D. in Philosophy from Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, and in 1993, at the University of Strasbourg, he obtained the Habilitation à Diriger des Recherches en Philosophie des Sciences. Between 1971 and 1974, during his doctoral studies, he taught some courses at Washington University in the United States. Between 1975 and 1981 he worked in Chile. In 1975, Miguel Espinoza was elected by the students as the Best Professor at the Universidad del Norte in Chile.

In 1976 he married the French professor of psychology and psychophysiology Odile Reynier in Chile. Because of Miguel Espinoza's militancy against the military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, he had to leave his native country and settled with his family in France. He worked temporarily at various universities until he was permanently appointed at the University of Strasbourg. At the universities where he worked, he organised a Seminar on Science and Metaphysics in which scientists and philosophers such as René Thom and Jacques Merleau-Ponty took part.

He is a member of the Scientific Committee of some ten philosophy journals in several countries. Between 1998 and 2012 he was a member of the Comité National des Universités (French National Committee of Universities), section 72, Philosophy and History of Science, Logic, Epistemology. From 1990 to the present he has been an International Expert in Philosophy of Science at the National Commission for Scientific and Technological Research, Government of Chile (CONICYT).

Philosophy of Nature

In 2008 he founded in Paris the Philosophy of Nature Circle. It is an interdisciplinary and trilingual society (English, French, Spanish) with more than a hundred professors and researchers from several countries. Its aim is to contribute to the revival of the philosophy of nature. To this end, symposia and seminars are organised and the journal Scripta Philosophiæ Naturalis is published.

Miguel Espinoza's philosophy of nature is a universal naturalism. Contrary to traditional naturalism, universal naturalism is neither physicalist nor scientistic. It is a realist metaphysics that precedes science, underlies it and prolongs it. These are its main theses: Natural entities and processes are intrinsically intelligible. Reason, meaning and truth exist in things before blossoming consciously in our intellects. Thus intuition, reflective knowledge and understanding are the projection of the intelligibility of natural entities and processes in our minds which are also natural. Our intellect is an emergent system which displays, though not exclusively, biological, physical, and mathematical properties and constraints. From the fact that nature is a tightly woven network of causal relationships, it follows, first, that to explain and to understand means to climb up the ladder of necessity; second, that nature is continuous. From an epistemological point of view, we distinguish several natural strata: mathematical, physical, chemical, biological and psychosocial. All of them are present, for instance, in our own person, which is, however, lived and experienced as a unit. The enigmatic character of the real and natural continuity between the epistemologically distinguishable strata is due to the fact that we do not have the appropriate concepts to describe and explain the causal relations between them. In turn, the absence of such concepts is due to the fact that all the forces, energies and fields that animate nature have not yet been discovered.

Books

— El evento de entender, Dirección de Investigación, Universidad Austral de Chile, 1978.

— Análisis de la imaginación, Universidad Austral de Chile, 1980.

— Essai sur l'intelligibilité de la nature, Éditions Universitaires du Sud, Toulouse, 1987.

— Théorie de l'intelligibilité, 1a éd. Éditions Universitaires du Sud, Toulouse, 1994, 2a éd. Ellipses, Paris, 1998.

— La science : les mathématiques, l'expérience, la logique, Ellipses, Paris, 1996.

— Les mathématiques et le monde sensible, Ellipses, Paris, 1997.

— Philosophie de la nature, Ellipses, Paris, 2000.

[https://www.cairn.info/revue-archives-de-philosophie-2004-3-page-493.htm — ''De la science à la philosophie. Hommage à Jean Largeault'', L'Harmattan, Paris, 2001.]

— Pensar la ciencia (with Roberto Torretti), Tecnos, Madrid, 2004.

— Théorie du déterminisme causal, L’Harmattan, Paris, 2006.

— Repenser le naturalisme, L'Harmattan, Paris, 2014.

— La Matière éternelle et ses harmonies éphémères, L'Harmattan, Paris, 2017.

[https://www.meer.com/es/authors/850-miguel-espinoza — ''Pensar la naturaleza. Epistolario filosófico'', Uniediciones, Bogotá, 2020.]

[https://www.meer.com/en/authors/850-miguel-espinoza — ''A Theory of Intelligibility. A Contribution to the Revival of the Philosophy of Nature'', Thombooks Press, Toronto, Ontario, 2020 (reissue)]

[https://unistra.academia.edu/MiguelESPINOZA/CurriculumVitae — ''La Hiérarchie naturelle. Matière, vie, conscience et symbole'', L’Harmattan, Paris, 2022.]

— He has several entries published in l'Encyclopédie Philosophique, P.U.F., Paris, section Logique, Mathématique, Épistémologie et Philosophie des sciences.