Xavier Zubiri 1898 – 1983

Xavier Zubiri was a Spanish Catholic philosopher and one of the most original Spanish-language metaphysicians of the twentieth century. After studies under Husserl, Heidegger, and Schrodinger in interwar Germany, he held the chair of metaphysics at Madrid until the Spanish Civil War and afterward worked privately, supported by his own circle and by foreign foundations. His trilogy Sentient Intelligence, On Essence, and Man and God developed a distinctive philosophy in which the human being is a structural unity of intelligence and the senses and reality is the constitutive moment of every act of knowing. He shaped the work of his pupil Ignacio Ellacuria and an international school of Zubiri studies.