Benito feijoo and the spanish enlightenment: a historical view of a failed project

Abstract

In a long journey through the history of Spain, the author aims to discover the uniqueness of the Enlightenment in the Iberian country. Thus, he attempts to refute the idea according to which there was not such a thing as an Age of Enlightenment in Spain and, therefore, not a true Modern Philosophy. He presents, in a second moment, the intellectual figure of Father Benito Feijoo as a paradigmatic example of what is known as the “Ilustración española [Spanish Enlightenment] and its difference from the English Enlightenment, the French Lumières and the German Aufklärung. In the end, he develops the idea according to which the 18th century laid the foundations for a supranational cultural revolution that was materialized in the Cádiz Constitution of 1812, and then aborted by the absolutist Restoration of Fernando VII [Ferdinand VII of Spain].