Fernando Savater

Fernando Fernandez-Savater Martin was born in San Sebastian in the Spanish Basque Country in 1947 and became one of the most widely read philosophers writing in Spanish, and one of the most politically exposed.

He took his doctorate in philosophy and taught at the Autonomous University of Madrid and later at the Complutense University of Madrid, holding chairs in ethics and in philosophy. He describes himself as an agnostic, an anglophile, and a defender of the Enlightenment in the tradition of Voltaire.

Ethics for Amador, published in 1991, is his best-known work outside academic circles. He wrote it as a long letter to his son Amador, then fifteen, and it covers the exercise of freedom, the acceptance of responsibility, why living alongside other people is a condition of living fully, the relationship between ethics and politics, and the legitimacy of wanting to enjoy yourself.

He states at the outset that it is not a manual, contains no survey of moral theory, and will teach a teacher very little. Its central argument is that ethics is the attempt to live on purpose, deliberately and consciously, as opposed to acting by habit, by order, or by whim, and that only a decision you made yourself counts as a moral act. It has been translated widely and taught in Spanish-language schools for more than thirty years.

Politics for Amador followed in 1992, and The Value of Educating in 1997.

He was a prominent opponent of the Basque separatist group ETA and a founder of the citizens' platform Basta Ya, which cost him years of living under police protection and required him to leave the Basque Country. He has won the Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought and the Planeta Prize.