Lorenzo Peña

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

Republican republicanism is thus a political philosophy tending to increase the scope of activities entrusted to the State, by setting up a planned economy with a powerful public sector and a gradual socialization of property; in the meanwhile private ownership has to be fraught with legal burdens for the common good. This doctrine borrows a number of ideas from the traditions of the British Fabian Society, French solidarism and German chair-socialism as well as the Spanish school of Krausist philosophers and lawyers who inspired the II Republic (1931–1939), whose Constitution he takes as a paradigm.