Jesús Mosterín (24 September 1941 – 4 October 2017) was a leading Spanish philosopher and a thinker of broad spectrum, often at the frontier between science and philosophy.
Biography He was born in Bilbao in 1941. He studied in Spain, Germany, and the USA. Professor of Logic and Philosophy of Science at the University of Barcelona since 1983, he founded there an active Department of Logic, Philosophy and History of Science. From 1996, he was Research Professor at the National Research Council of Spain (CSIC). He was a fellow of the Center for Philosophy of Science in Pittsburgh and a member of several international academies. He played a crucial role in the introduction of mathematical logic, analytical philosophy and philosophy of science in Spain and Latin America. Besides his academic duties, he fulfilled important functions in the international publishing industry, especially in the Salvat and Hachette groups. He was actively involved in the protection of wildlife and its defense in the mass media. He died on October 4th 2017 from pleural mesothelioma, caused by exposure to asbestos.
Logic Mosterín acquired his initial logical formation at the Institut für mathematische Logik und Grundlagenforschung in Münster (Germany). He published the first modern and rigorous textbooks of logic and set theory in Spanish. He has worked on topics of first and second order logic, axiomatic set theory, computability and complexity. He has shown how the uniform digitalization of each type of symbolic object (such as chromosomes, texts, pictures, movies or pieces of music) can be considered to implement a certain positional numbering system. This result gives a precise meaning to the notion that the set of natural numbers constitutes a universal library and indeed a universal data base. Mosterín has edited the first edition of the complete works of Kurt Gödel in any language. Together with Thomas Bonk, he has edited an unpublished book of Rudolf Carnap on axiomatics (in German). He has also delved in the historical and biographical aspects of the development of modern logic, as shown in his original work on the lives of Gottlob Frege, Georg Cantor, Bertrand Russell, John von Neumann, Kurt Gödel and Alan Turing, intertwined with a formal analysis of their main technical contributions.
Philosophy of science
Concepts and theories in science
Karl Popper tried to establish a criterion of demarcation between science and metaphysics, but the speculative turn taken by certain developments in theoretical physics has contributed to muddle the issue again. Mosterín has been concerned with the question of the reliability of theories and claims. He makes a distinction between the standard core of a scientific discipline, that at a certain point in time should only include relatively reliable and empirically supported ideas, and the cloud of speculative hypotheses surrounding it. Part of the theoretical progress consists in the incorporation of newly tested hypotheses of the cloud to the standard core. In this connection, he has analyzed epistemic notions like detection and observation. Observation, but not detection, is accompanied by awareness. Detection is always mediated by technological instruments, but observation only sometimes (like glasses in vision). The signals received by detectors have to be transduced into types of energy accessible to our senses. Following the path open by Patrick Suppes, Mosterín has paid much attention to the structure of metric concepts, because of their indispensable mediating role at the interface between theory and observation where reliability is tested. He has also made contributions to the study of mathematical modeling and of the limits of the axiomatic method in the characterization of real-world structures. The real world is extremely complex, and sometimes the best we can do is to apply the method of theoretical science: to pick up in the set-theoretical universe a mathematical structure with some formal similarities with the situation we are interested in, and use it as a model of that parcel of the world. Together with Roberto Torretti, Mosterín has written a uniquely comprehensive encyclopedic dictionary of logic and philosophy of science.
Philosophy of biology Besides actively participating in the current discussions on evolutionary theory and genetics, Mosterín has also tackled issues like the definition of life itself or the ontology of biological organisms and species. Following in Aristotle’s and Schrödinger’s footsteps, he has been asking the simple question: what is life? He has analyzed the main proposed definitions, based on metabolism, reproduction, thermodynamics, complexity and evolution, and found all of them wanting. It is true that all organisms on Earth share many characteristics, from the encoding of genetic information in DNA to the storage of energy in ATP, but these common features merely reflect the inheritance from a common ancestor that possibly acquired them in a random way. From that point of view, our biology is the parochial science of life on Earth, rather than a universal science of life in general. Such a general biology seems impossible, as long as we do not detect and come to know other forms of life in the galaxy (if they exist). Concerning the ontological thesis of Michael Ghiselin and David Hull on the individuality of biological species, Mosterín shows that they are neither classes nor individuals in the usual meaning of these words. He tries to extend and make more precise the available conceptual framework of the discussion. Specifically, he shows the formal equivalence of the set-theoretical and the mereological (or part and individual) approach, so that everything that can be said about the classes can be translated into the jargon of individuals, and the other way around. All these concerns converge in his recent philosophy of animality, which combines the ontology of animals as paradigmatic individuals with the insights and results of biological research. This general theory of animals provides a solid foundation for the development of anthropology, conceived as the science of human primates.
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