Background
Turró, Ramón was born in 1854 in Malgrat, near Gerona, Spain.
Turró, Ramón was born in 1854 in Malgrat, near Gerona, Spain.
University of Barcelona, infis: Bernard, BrownSéquard, Helmholtz, Kant, Pasteur and Pavlov.
1900-1914, Researcher, University of Barcelona Faculty of Medicine. 1914-1926, Researcher, later Director. Municipal Laboratory of Barcelona.
1923-1926, Founder. Catalan Philosophy Society.
Turró', Revista de Filosofía, Madrid. Guy, A. (1955) ‘L’intuition trophique selon R. Turró’, in Vie et pensée, Paris, pp. 119-24. (1983) Histoire de la philosophie espagnole, Toulouse: Association des Publications de l’Université de Toulouse-Le Mirail. Tusquets, J. (1926) ‘L’obra filosófica de R. Turró, Criterion, chapter 6. Turró has been described as a ‘radical empiricist’, and this can be seen to be clearly based on his emphasis on strict inductive observation and experimentation. This was in the main reaction to the cavalier disregard for established methodologies and the critical analysis of accepted dogma practised by his teacher. Professor José Letamendi. This stress on induction led to his best known work, Els origens del coneixement: la fam [The Origins of Knowledge: Hunger] (1912), in which, within a positivist framework opposed to the idealism of Kantian epistemology, he sought to explain the appearance and constitutive factors of natural certainty, and of the complex problem of knowledge, whose origins, he argued, lay in the experience of hunger, not an ‘amorphous necessity' but a sum of‘elective tendencies’ which select from nature the most appropriate elements which would lead to the reconstitution of the organism. This process begins with a ‘trophic disquiet’ which grasps only vaguely the danger to the organism that hunger represents. The ‘trophic reflex’ then motivates and guides the reparative organs. However, when the organs’ reserves have been exhausted, pure hunger appears, which this time is felt consciously, altering the ‘trophic intuition’ which, aware of alimentary needs and the precise quantities required, organizes itself around the ‘trophic experience’, the experience of a series of reparative drives. Above all. Turro maintained, this is a logical process, carried out upon sensorially imposed data. His methodological coherence was well received, especially amongst psycho-biologists such as Clara Davis and D. Katz, and A. Arostegui labelled his system ‘a metaphysics of substance’. The renowned Spanish philosopher Miguel de Unamuno, in his Prologue to the Castillian translation of Turro’s major work, joked ‘I eat, therefore I am’.