1. INTRODUCTION

Something unusual has happened to Ramon Llull (Raimundus Lullus, 1232-1316), the franciscan thinker from Majorca. He has been at the same time derided and hailed as a philosopher. He has been instrumental in creating our foundational insights as computer scientists and logicians, yet he occupies a very minor place in the histories of Philosophy, Mathematics or Logic. He was one of the first philosophers to claim a logical basis for religious belief yet he has been considered a source of alchemy, cabbalistics and mysticism. He is considered a conceited eccentric fool and -just read Martin Gardner's 1958 piece- a maze of confused thinking, but such indictment hardly squares with the undeniable fact that he had foresights which anticipated developments 700 years in the future. So, what is the truth? and what is the man?

That Llull is really a marginal sidepiece in the history of Western Philosophy 15 clear -as it was to him. And, because he resented it, he innovated, and tried to convince the Parisian intellectuals that his innovative ideas had merit -to no avail. He was not understood at his first Sorbonne appearance in 1289. His combinatorics were definitely not the method to use for logical analysis (causal chaining was). When he came back in 1309-11 with a more accessible system he was greeted with a flurry of sympathy rather than real acceptation. Some found in him a firm advocate of basing faith solely on logic, and all understanding on reason (against the revelationists and the mystically-inclined). But after his death the sympathy faded out, a victim of the Inquisition and the dominican-franciscan l4th-century struggle. In an ironic twist, Llull, who had always put logic before faith, and had done this by propounding innovative ideas, became a thinker derided by the first science pioneers (Bacon or Descartes, who had a lot to thank him for), while he became the hero of alchemists, cabbalists and general mystics (thanks to being attributed authorship of esoteric apocrypha). The usual charge today (for Gardner, as it was for Descartes), that his thinking was actually confused, is not the whole reason for the misrepresentation of Llull's thought: confusion between religious faith, ethical motives, apologetics and natural explanations was the rule rather than the exception in medieval philosophy. As for his own equivocations, it is a well-known fact that all innovators muddle through their own discoveries -the full reach of which they do not usually grasp- and even extrapolate wildly from them. Llull's peculiar innovations, strange as they seemed at the time, sound familiar to the modern ear. Here we list some of the more typically Lullian.