This is a post by Manuel García-Carpintero (University of Barcelona).

Francesc Pereña, a founding member of LOGOS and key contributor to its success, died on February 16 after a long and cruel illness.

Francesc got his PhD at the University of Barcelona in 1987 under the supervision of Emilio Lledó, with a dissertation on Schelling’s views on freedom that he had conceived during a four-year stay in Heidelberg, mentored by H. G. Gadamer. He worked mostly on the philosophy of the 19^th-century German philosophers Fichte and Schelling, and on the phenomenology of Husserl and Heidegger. At Heidelberg, he acquired an early appreciation of analytic philosophy – to which his PhD supervisor Emilio Lledó was also sympathetic – through the influence of Ernst Tugendhat and his colleague and lifelong friend Peter Bieri. On a personal note on my initial acquaintance with Francesc, this was decisive for me to obtain a mixed position to teach logic and philosophy courses at the University of Barcelona. Daniel Quesada, my supervisor, asked Francesc to read a very analytic paper I had written on Plato. Francesc’s help was crucial to convince a mostly non-analytic committee. This was the beginning of a beautiful friendship – certainly to me one of the most significant in my lifetime. It made for many occasions of pure philosophical enjoyment, but also testing conflicting perspectives in watching soccer matches, indulging a shared penchant for gossip, or commenting Liceu new opera productions.

Francesc was part of the activities (seminars, reading groups, workshops) that launched LOGOS in the early 90s, and he was an initial member of the project that gave some formal recognition to the group. He occupied for us a role familiar in many philosophy departments – the role of the sharp but mostly oral, “all but written” philosopher (the “albritton” as Dennett called this figure in his 1987 Philosophical Lexicon after Rogers Albritton, who famously played the role at UCLA). Francesc was, throughout his life for anybody who met him – as any of them would report – the paradigm of the good person – in Spanish, the hombre bueno, as opposed to the buen hombre; the one who could truly say with the poet (I assume that alluding to that Spanish contrast), “soy, en el buen sentido de la palabra, bueno”. A “buen hombre” can be unremarkable and clueless in his goodness. The “hombre bueno” will be fair and generous out of principle. And he could mutate into a merciless critic when confronted, as the case might be, with philosophical bullshit – with the “romanzas de los tenores huecos y el coro de los grillos que cantan a la luna”, to go on with the quotation from the poet. It always took me by surprise, not just when I was the target of the assault. Like most others, I valued in the extreme that quality; it has helped me immensely over the years to improve my work.

As with other albrittons, it was the combination of these two virtues – personal goodness and philosophical sharpness – that, over the years, led LOGOS members, visitors and friends to love Francesc and highly value his company. They also explain why he was the most able among us to attract brilliant local students; Marta Jorba and Carlota Serrahima are two of the more recent examples. Francesc was also crucially important to us when we finally had the critical mass needed to start our master and PhD in Analytic Philosophy – before that we could only be part of a Cognitive Science program. We shared a conception of how to best impart philosophical abilities that valued exposition to different traditions, and to historical contributions to the subject. He tried his best to co-opt non-analytic philosophers for the program. Although this ultimately didn’t work out, the attempt was decisive in getting a sufficient number of votes from the non-analytic faculty to get the program approved.

We will realize in due time how much we miss Francesc, when sadness fades a little; we will then keep in mind how fortunate we have been to share with him those outstanding moments of the time we are given.