Those who know Alejandro Llano through his biography already know many details about him. But, as enjoyable as it is to read, Olor a hierba seca ( 2008) does not reflect the mark he left among those of us who have had him as a teacher or friend. An example of uncommon kindness, he was accessible to people from all walks of life. His colleagues at the University of Navarra especially benefited from this quality. For his disciples -and he has had many- he has always been a reference not only in the way of doing Philosophy but also in the way of recognizing it as present and operative in the events of our time. 

His dedication to metaphysics and the theory of knowledge was perfectly compatible with a passion for culture and a lively interest in what Aristotle called "the Philosophy of human things". His extensive bibliography includes books such as Fenómeno y trascendencia en Kant ( 1973), which marked a milestone in the Kantian programs of study in language Spanish, or Metafísica y lenguaje (1984), in which he analyzed the metaphysics implicit in the linguistic turn, but also others such as La nueva sensibilidad, which at the end of the 1980s anticipated elements of the cultural change then associated with postmodernity: ecological awareness, feminism, the various emerging movements in civil society.

Anticipate: not to lag behind. In Llano we recognize that desire for contemporaneity that accompanies youth as a natural thing, but which the passing of the years reveals as an authentic virtue. El diablo es conservador ( 2001) was the provocative degree scroll he chose to bring together several essays in which he stirred up approaches to social reality or culture tinged with restorative nostalgia. No subject nostalgia -other than nostalgia for the Asturias of his childhood- was acceptable to the philosopher who had devoted his first essay to exploring the question of the future. In The Future of Freedom (1985), in fact, Alexander did not intend to question the existence of freedom in the future, but to state categorically that the future belongs to freedom; a freedom that does not allow itself to be imprisoned by causal mechanisms, but is distinguished, above all, by the capacity to initiate new processes.

No wonder then that he lamented the way in which the technocracy configured by the assembly of market and state was eroding what Husserl calls the "world of life," the native terrain of culture and freedom. That is why, among other things, he wrote Civic Humanism (1999); or The University in the Face of the New (2003), in which he reflected on how to train people who would not end up in the caricature of the "new men" pointed out by Nietzsche and reiterated by Weber: "specialists without spirit, lifers without heart". To the same formative purpose was due his only incursion in the field of ethics: La vida lograda ( 2002).

An indefatigable reader, he found in contemporary literature a record of the human soul, but also the palpitation of his own time. At the same time, as a metaphysician of race, he never left aside the theoretical impulse. Desire, Violence and Sacrifice (2004) delves into the triadic structure of desire present in René Girard's literary theory, offering the reader a core topic to interpret the world around us from the perspective of desire, as he had previously done from knowledge, in The Enigma of Representation (1999).

Learning to read and write: this was Llano's main mission statement of a School of letters, the door of entrance to a humanist culture. In the intellectual and vital trajectory of Alejandro Llano we also discover by what means humanism becomes humanity; by what path the philosopher's life, affected like any other by El sueño y la vigilia de la razón ( 2001), constitutes, in spite of everything, a successful life.