José Fernández Tamames is a philosopher, legal scholar, and lecturer at UNIE Universidad (Madrid), working at the intersection of philosophical anthropology, philosophy of law, and AI ethics.
His research develops a systematic ontological framework grounding human freedom not as an ethical attribute but as a biological-ontological structure: humans are free (ontologically incomplete), therefore rational — not the reverse. This inversion of the Aristotelian tradition is articulated through the distinction between Causa Primera (originating agency under instruction-deficit) and Causa Segunda (systems that transmit determination without origina…
José Fernández Tamames is a philosopher, legal scholar, and lecturer at UNIE Universidad (Madrid), working at the intersection of philosophical anthropology, philosophy of law, and AI ethics.
His research develops a systematic ontological framework grounding human freedom not as an ethical attribute but as a biological-ontological structure: humans are free (ontologically incomplete), therefore rational — not the reverse. This inversion of the Aristotelian tradition is articulated through the distinction between Causa Primera (originating agency under instruction-deficit) and Causa Segunda (systems that transmit determination without originating it), and operationalized through a tripartite structure: suspension, evaluation, and signature.
He is the author of La Causa Primera: Sinfonía filosófica en cinco movimientos con obertura (2026), a 755-page treatise developing this framework across ontology, law, and ethics, and of La Tercera Promesa: Humanismo y libertad en la Era del Algoritmo (2025). With R. Nicolás-Sans and F.J. Zamora García, he has co-authored Inteligencia artificial y la doctrina social de la Iglesia (McGraw Hill, 2025) and published in the Revista Española de Derecho Canónico (Q1). With S. Checa Prieto, he develops a research line on AI accountability, authorship, and legal imputation, including the Three-Pillar Test, the Verification Tax, and the Proof of Originality Protocol.
Current work includes the tripartite paper series (Suspension — Evaluation — Signature), a Design-Based Research programme applying the interval framework to legal education, and the ongoing treatise Los Fundamentos del Conocimiento: Crítica de la razón indigente.
