Ramon Llull: The first proto-European

Abstract

Since the seven centuries from his death in 1215, Ramon Llull has been an unavoidable figure in the history of philosophy and science. His apparently ceaseless work to connect the Islamic, Jew and Christian cultures―and, of course religions―spread the knowledge across the Mediterranean region and beyond, reaching almost every country in Europe. His attempt to connect faith and logic is in the base of his wonderful Ars combinatoria and, as a result, in the base of the modern computational science. Philosophers such as Cusanus, Pico della Mirandola, Bruno, Descartes, Hobbes, Leibniz, were influenced by the Lullian works. And the same can be said for architects like Juan de Herrera (architect of The Escorial) and even for kings and emperors such as Felipe II. The appearance of the first volume of Ramon Llull. Vida i Obres, by Pere Villalba, in 2015, published by the Elsa Peretti Foundation and the Institute for Catalan Studies (IEC), commemorated the 700th centenary of this emblematic figure of the culture both Mediterranean and universal, and allowed the access to an enormous quantity of information that had been scattered in different works, collections and libraries. [Contrib Sci 12(1):51-61 (2016)]

Keywords: Ramon Llull (1232–1315/16) · Lullism · Cartesian criticism