Interviste

CF: The very conversation we are having now could be seen as a natural result of the establishment of a community of philosophers that works throughout the world, that aims to share information and to discuss it with no distinctions of nationality, cultural backgrounds and personal conditions. However, we cannot forget that the project of establishing such a community was just taking its first steps in continental Europe when you flew to Stanford, in 1982, to start your research path. At that time, I guess, very few philosophers from the Latin countries of Europe were strongly aware of the philosophical issues that were discussed in the United States. So I am curious to know... Did you leave Spain with sharp ideas about your projects, or rather was it the American philosophical environment to show you the way once you were already there?

GM: I was very lucky because the philosophy of language teachers that I had when I was doing my undergraduate degree in Barcelona, Juan Acero and Daniel Quesada, had already seen the importance of internationalization: they had already seen the fact that the discussion in philosophy is a global discussion. In fact Acero had been in Helsinki, working with Jaakko Hintikka, and Quesada had been first in Germany and then in the United States, at Stanford; so I was already taught by these people with a kind of sensitivity to certain issues in philosophy. However, at that time in Barcelona, or in Spain or in many other countries in continental Europe, there was no place where there would be a critical mass of people to educate new researchers, which is why it was almost a necessity to go away. Most of the people that were my teachers at the University of Barcelona during my degree had never published papers in peer-reviewed journals of prestige, nor had they published books with international impact, very few had moved from or to other universities. For me, arriving in the United States, after having been in a very endogamic atmosphere, was like a breath of fresh air.