Lorenzo Peña (born August 29, 1944) is a Spanish philosopher, lawyer, logician and political thinker. His rationalism is a neo-Leibnizian approach both in metaphysics and law.
Life Lorenzo Peña was born in Alicante, Spain, on August 29, 1944. Persecuted by Franco's regime, his mother (born in the Madrid Royal Palace in 1911) was not allowed to return to the Spanish capital city until 1952.
In Madrid Peña was taught Greek and Indoeuropean linguistics by the renowned Spanish philologist Francisco Rodríguez Adrados and ethics by J.L. Aranguren.
Upon becoming a political activist in February 1962, he was forced to emigrate in the spring 1965. In early 1969 he married his class-mate María Teresa Alonso in Meudon (France). While staying in Paris he was a disciple of the French historian Pierre Vilar and he witnessed the upheaval of May 1968. He gave up all clandestine activities in 1972. After spending 18 years in exile, he went back to Spain in 1983.
Career In 1974 Peña was awarded his philosophy degree (licenciatura) from the PUCE (the Ecuadorian Pontifical University in Quito), with a thesis on Anselm of Canterbury's Ontological argument for the existence of God, his adviser being Julio C. Terán, S.J., who taught him hermeneutics. He then spent four years in Liège, Belgium, (1975–1979) where, under Paul Gochet's supervision, he wrote his dissertation on a system of contradictorial (paraconsistent) logic. At that time he was also granted a complementary degree in American Studies by the University of Liège.
Upon receiving his Ph.D. in 1979, he came back to Ecuador. He was a professor at the PUCE for four years and later on, after returning to Spain, at León University for another three years. In 1987 he was appointed senior scientific researcher at the CSIC (Spanish National Research Council, Spain's main academic research institution).
He spent six months in Canberra as a visiting scholar (1992–1993), under the guidance of the late Richard Sylvan, and was a colleague of Philip Pettit at the philosophy department of the Australian National University. Later on he shifted his research orientation to the philosophy of law. He became a lawyer by earning first an M.L. (DEA) from Autonomous University of Madrid in 2007 and then a PhD in Law (Doctor of Juridical Science) from the same University in 2015 with a doctoral dissertation entitled IDEA IURIS LOGICA. In 2008 he enrolled with the Madrid Bar Association of Advocates. He reached the highest academic professional level (Research Professor) in 2006.
In August 2014 he underwent compulsory retirement but was granted the title of honorary professor at his academic institution, the CSIC. As such he was appointed co-PI (principal investigator) of a new R+D project on the legal and ethical responsibility of omissions (2014-2017).
Peña is the founder of the digital journal SORITES (1995-2008) and also the founder and former leader of JuriLog (Logical Jurisprudence), the logic-and-law research group at the CSIC, which is carrying out an inquiry into nomological concepts and values.
Philosophical views
Ontophantics Ontophantics is the system of philosophical conceptions developed by Peña in the years 1974–1995 (which do not necessarily coincide with those he has developed in recent years).
Although ontophantics is essentially a metaphysical doctrine, its starting point was a methodological approach through the philosophy of language, based on a realist semiotic theory to the effect that what is shown by language is also said (as against the Tractarian dichotomy), namely reality or being. Rather than regarding sentences and states of affairs in a static way, as logical atomists have done, ontophantics looks upon them dynamically, as transitions or processes. To utter a statement is not a mere series of successive actions of uttering the sentence's components but a transit from one saying into another along a temporal dimension. Likewise facts are nontemporal transitions consisting in a relation passing from one thing to another.
Since all passages seem to be subject to Zeno's paradox of the arrow, a paraconsistent logic is resorted to in order to solve the puzzle. Instead of blaming contradictions on thought or language Peña ascribes them to reality by embracing a non-classical logic.
Another feature of ontophantics is the rejection of all forms of essentialism in the sense of considering attributions of being-so independent of assertions of being or existence—an opinion Peña attributes to Aristotle and Alexius Meinong. Peña's existence-oriented ontology identifies each entity with a fact, its existence. Ontological truth is also identified with existence, which is a reduplicative property. Ontophantics follows Frege's view of sentences as names of objects, but in this case the objects under consideration are states of affairs. From a linguistic perspective phenomena of nominalization are thus gone into from an outlook which eliminates any categorical cleavages. Such a metaphysical theory is strongly Platonistic. Ontophantics is also a modal realism, which takes reality to be all-encompassing, and thus comprising non-actual worlds.
Ontophantics contains a holistic theory of knowledge influenced by Gonseth and Quine, considering the cleavage between analytic and synthetic judgments a matter of degree. This epistemological holism is a sort of empirical coherentism, for which the task of human knowledge is to set up theories, to confront them with experience taken as a whole and to gradually modify them. Not only foundationalism of any kind is rejected but reliabilism is not accepted either, since no procedure is to be unconditionally trusted come what may.
Peña rehabilitates induction as a sound ground even for logical truths (he follows the outdated opinion of John Stuart Mill). The choice among alternative logical systems has to be made in accordance with plausible criteria, one of which is fitness with the best explanation of available evidence, thus resorting to an optimization postulate, which in turn gets circularly warranted by its epistemological fruitness.
That optimization postulate is a rationality ideal which also provides a ground for assuming God's existence. Peña's first published book, The coincidence of opposites in God (Quito, 1981), was a discussion of the proofs of God's inexistence canvassed in the analytical philosophy of religion. He broached the question through a combination of a contradictorial logic and a non-standard set theory (in a way a mirror reversion of Quine's ML system), which regards infinite entities as not being subject to the principle of separation in virtue of which a thing is comprised by the set of entities with a certain characteristic only to the extent it has that characteristic. In that book he adopted determinism and rejected free will, a position he has maintained ever since, using it as a lever while grappling with issues in the philosophy of law.
Contradictorial gradualism
As against other persuasions in paraconsistent logic (such as relevantism and the Brazilian school), the paraconsistent treatment developed by Peña, which belongs in the fuzzy family founded by Lotfi A. Zadeh, regards true contradictions as situations wherein a state of affairs enjoys only partial existence. His approach to fuzziness deviates from Zadeh's mainstream orthodoxy in rejecting alethic maximalism and so embracing the principle of excluded middle, regarding all intermediaries as degrees of both truth and falseness, being and non-being (Plato's influence is discernable here).
Transitive logic
In order to clarify his philosophical proposal Peña has set up several systems of sentential and quantificational logic which he calls «transitive logic», TL, as partial implementations of his programme. TL is characterized by a couple of negations, one strong («not at all»), which has all classical properties, and a weak one (a mere «not»), which is degree-sensitive. The fragment of TL without strong negation is a non-conservative extension of Alan Ross Anderson and Nuel Belnap's logic of relevance, E, (by adding the funnel principle, namely that either A implies B or else A; in other words, what is not true at all implies anything). Transitive implication is partly similar to relevant implication (although much stronger), but its underlying philosophical motivation is entirely different, since it is read «to the extent [at least] that...». The fragment of TL without weak negation and the implication operator is classical logic. TL is thus a logical blend or rather a crossbreed.
Peña's plan to investigate the grounds of his logical system as a nonclassical combinatory logic has thus far remained programmatic, but the combinatory account fits his metaphysical approach.
Cumulativism
Cumulativism is Peña's philosophical orientation as developed from 1996 onwards. Cumulativism is contradictorial gradualism with an added emphasis on six hitherto partly implicit components of his approach: (1) All transitions are either continuous or at least supervene on underlying continuous mutations, going through successive steps; hence change is always slow and implies a succession of stages, each of which keeps many qualities of the previous stage. (2) All transitions are either aggregations or disaggregations (processes of sedimentation or erosion) since cumulation, gathering, is reality's most prominent feature (ontophantics had already conceived of all entities as sets, but now the principle of togetherness is made the mainstay of the philosophical system). (3) Metaphysical isolationism is avoided by espousing collectivism both in metaphysics and political philosophy. (4) A programme of conceptual flexibilization is proposed, by which concepts become soft, fluid, with shifting borders. (5) The gatherings or clusters this approach advances are called cumuli, cumulations—so as not to be mistaken for sets in the sense of standard set-theory—the main idea remaining that not all things congregated by a cluster necessarily share the cluster's defining charasterictic (and, more generally, the Meinongian description principle fails, namely that the entity which is thus-and-so is indeed thus-and-so). (6) As a compendium, cumulativism is taken to be the philosophy of conjunction: A-and-B is a conjunctive state of affairs which exists to the extent A and B exist. A-and-B's own properties supervene on those held by A and B.
Nomological logic
Peña's work on deontic logic began short after his 1979 Ph.D. diss. The first paper he published on the issue appeared in 1988. At that time, he essentially clung to von Wright's standard approach, departing from it only by introducing degrees and admitting normative contradictions or antinomies. He soon became dissatisfied with that scheme which proved to be incompatible with serious applications of deontic logic to the practice of legal reasoning. He found out the flaw was to think of deontic logic as a species of the genus modal logic by stressing the similarities between duty and necessity, and between licitness and possibility.
The underlying mistake, according to Peña, is a wrong metaphysical assumption which denies the existence of deontic states of affairs connected by implications. That denial pushes deontic logicians to conceive of deontic logic as the logic of duty-compliances. Thus if A necessarily implies B, standard deontic logic believes that the duty to do A implies a duty to do B—this is the rule of logical closure. That rule is one of the first dogmas waived by Peña's deontic approach.
Peña was thus prompted to produce a new system of deontic logic, Nomological Logic, or NL (also called 'Juristic Logic'), combining a number of particularities which make it unique: