The Madrid philosopher Juan Antonio Rivera died a few days ago at the age of 66, when nothing seemed to predict the fatal outcome, given that he enjoyed excellent health. He bequeaths us a philosophical production as appreciable as it is suggestive. At the beginning of the millennium he publishes The Government of Fortune: The Power of Chance in History and Human Affairs (2000). Three years later she wins the Espasa Essay Prize with What Socrates would say to Woody Allen: Cinema and Philosophy (2003), that would have a second installment in Woody Allen’s open letter to Plato (2006). In 2006 she won the Free Enterprise Award with Less utopia and more freedom (2005). His extensive experience as a secondary school teacher in Tenerife and Barcelona makes him publish Camelia and philosophy: Adventures, adventures and misadventures of a young student (2016). This same year it saw the light Morality and civilization (2024). On his work table were the materials for the new book that he had planned, because he was a tireless intellectual married to study.
His style benefits from a solid cultural background. He was always an insatiable reader of literature, until he rediscovered his youthful passion for cinema, never stopping reading everything he thought he needed to deal with a certain topic, whether it was anthropology, economics or mathematics. We met half a century ago in the classrooms of the Complutense and forged a close friendship by sharing a couple of railway trips throughout Europe, immortalized in some travel diaries written by him and illustrated by photographs of my vintage.
He knew how to spread his passion for studying and during the race we formed an inseparable quintet with Rosa Montealegre, Carlos Gómez and Concha Roldán, from which Juan Antonio came out unmatched. He set out several times to present a doctoral thesis whose subject matter varied depending on his new intellectual interests and, although he never did so formally, he earned a doctorate. Honorary in the history of ideas with his priceless books. I am proud of having put you in contact with the magazine Keys to practical reasonwhere he published the advance of his later works.
With his ardent defenses of liberal theories he erased a sin of youth. On the shared desk in the university classroom he wrote the names of his three gurus at that youthful stage: Cortázar, Marx and Wittgenstein. At that time he was an ardent defender of Marxist analyses, although he later became a champion of the benefits of capitalism and a liberal with a social democratic soul. His writings are modulated by the continuous bass of analyzing human behavior from the human and social sciences, recently dedicating special attention to biology, psychology and economics, always with a spirit typical of the analytical tradition.
The role of different chances has also been a constant. His prose has an unusual richness of vocabulary and his sentences are never written haphazardly. This careful style is combined with that clarity that Ortega claimed as the courtesy of the philosopher. His love for cinema makes him lavish examples and maintain a constant dialogue with his readers so that they remain attentive to the narrated adventures. The deep imprint of his personality will remain among those of us who knew him and the many admirers of his careful work. It is the only immortality that atheists have.