He entered the University of Chile as a Philosophy student in 1953 and thus began a relationship that would extend for more than half a century. Here he took his first steps as a teacher, developed and shared his thoughts and research and was recognized as one of the most important philosophers in the country. Later years
Humberto Giannini received several awards in his later years. Among them was the Cavaliere Ordine Della Stella Della Solidarietà Italiana award in 2009 and, two years later, the Distinction of the Illustrious Municipality of Ñuñoa, the municipality where he lived for a large part of his life.

The University of Chile, the institution where he studied and taught throughout his academic life, named him Professor Emeritus in 2012. In 2013 he was chosen to receive the Juvenal Hernández Jaque Medal at this same University, and the Arcis University awarded him the title of Doctor Honoris Causa.

During this time he also carried out research projects in philosophy and wrote the last part of his work, giving lectures and classes at various universities, including the University of Chile, where he gave the inaugural Introduction to Philosophy class in 2014.

On November 24, 2014, at his home in the commune of Ñuñoa, he responded to an interview with the Chilean newspaper The Clinic, which he concluded with the following words: "And if you can have philosophy, my central philosophy is common sense. Never abandon common sense, philosophy could not abandon it. Since we do not have a universe, because it has gone too far, we have a world, our world. That is very important to me," after which he fainted from which he never woke up. On the afternoon of November 25, the philosopher Humberto Giannini Íñiguez passed away, at the age of 87.

He was born in the commune of San Bernardo.
He was born in the commune of San Bernardo.
Before entering the University of Chile, he was a merchant marine and also a firefighter.
Before entering the University of Chile, he was a merchant marine and also a firefighter.
His first Chair at the University of Chile was that of Medieval Philosophy.
His first Chair at the University of Chile was that of Medieval Philosophy.
He participated as Director of the Unesco Chair of Philosophy.
He participated as Director of the Unesco Chair of Philosophy.
Humberto Giannini in Italy.
Humberto Giannini in Italy.
In 2007 he published "Del bien que se espera y del bien que se debe".
In 2007 he published "Del bien que se espera y del bien que se debe".
In 1999 he was awarded the National Prize for Humanities and Social Sciences.
In 1999 he was awarded the National Prize for Humanities and Social Sciences.
During the ceremony in which he was named Professor Emeritus of the University of Chile in 2012.
During the ceremony in which he was named Professor Emeritus of the University of Chile in 2012.
He received the Rector Juvenal Hernández Jaque Medal, in the Arts, Letters and Humanities category.
He received the Rector Juvenal Hernández Jaque Medal, in the Arts, Letters and Humanities category.
Humberto Giannini during an interview with the magazine El Paracaídas (2014).
Humberto Giannini during an interview with the magazine El Paracaídas (2014).
Son of Osvaldo Giannini Piga and Olga Íñiguez Maturana, he was born in San Bernardo on February 25, 1927, although he lived in the city of Valparaíso for much of his childhood and adolescence. At the age of 16, he left school and joined the merchant navy. He always attributed the birth of his love for philosophy to this period of his life, to his travels and his long hours of contemplating the illuminated night sky, to which was added the stimulus of a summer workshop he took upon returning from his travels with the poet Gonzalo Rojas.

After having held various jobs – such as firefighter and customs employee, among others – he began to study Pedagogy in Philosophy at the Pedagogical Institute of the University of Chile, in 1953, at the age of 26. In 1959, he obtained a scholarship from the Italian government to study at the University of La Sapienzia, Rome, where he became a disciple of Enrico Castelli, an Italian philosopher who deeply inspired his thinking. Before his departure, he married the writer Luisa Eguiluz Baeza, with whom he shared 56 years of life. They were the parents of a son and three daughters.

His teaching work at the University of Chile
In 1960, he obtained the title of State Professor of Philosophy from the Faculty of Philosophy and Education of the University of Chile, with his thesis "The Metaphysics of Language", which was approved with unanimous distinction and later became a famous work.

Although his teaching career at the University of Chile began in 1958, when he served as an assistant in Professor Eugenio González's Introduction to Philosophy course, it was at the end of the 1960s when he obtained his first Chair at the University of Chile: Medieval Philosophy.

In 1972 he participated in the founding of the Philosophy Department at the North Campus of the University of Chile, with the aim of creating a philosophical workspace free from the political interventions of the time. Humberto Giannini was its director from its beginnings until its dissolution in the mid-1970s. From this position he supported his persecuted colleagues and political exiles. The end of the North Campus was a decision by the FACH Colonel, Julio Tapia Falk, whom the military dictatorship had appointed as Rector of the University during those years. At that time, most of the professors were exonerated.

Humberto Giannini continued teaching at the University of Chile. In the meantime, two of his major works were published: "Reflections on Human Coexistence" (1965) and "The Myth of Authenticity" (1968).

First recognitions
In 1978, she joined the Chilean Commission on Human Rights, a non-governmental organization that promoted the defense of Human Rights and documented the violations of fundamental rights committed during the civil-military dictatorship in Chile. In his words, this moment of rupture in Chilean society was fundamental to the course of his philosophical work: "the experience of the breakdown not only of the institutional breakdown of the society in which he lived but of the most elementary forms of common existence, of public and private relations, and with it, the distortion to the point of unrecognizability of the daily habits of coexistence. I am referring to the year 1973. (…) The breakdown of the real community in practice, and the exacerbated search for difference and differentiation, in theory, were the aspects that inclined me, intellectually and emotionally, towards an ethical reflection that, since then, seems to me to be linked to the search for the common" (Giannini, 2007, La metafísica eres tú).

In 1981 his work "Desde las palabras" was published, for which he won the Santiago Municipal Prize in 1984. In 1985 the first of 24 editions to date of his "Brief History of Philosophy" was published, a book that has served as fundamental teaching material for teaching philosophy in Chilean secondary education. A couple of years later, in 1987, one of his most famous works came to light, "Everyday Reflection: Towards an Archaeology of Experience," with a prologue written by the French philosopher Paul Ricoeur, and which was later translated into French and published in France under the title "La réflexion quotidienne : Vers une archéologie de l'expérience," in 1992. That same year, he received the Jorge Millas Prize, awarded by the Universidad Austral, and "La experiencia moral" was published.

Shortly before, at the end of the 1980s, near the end of the dictatorship in Chile, he joined the academic committee of the Ibero-American Encyclopedia of Philosophy, directed by the Spanish philosopher Manuel Reyes Mate, and in 1988, he was named a founding member of the Honorary Committee of the Collège International de Philosophie based in Paris.

In 1993, Humberto Giannini received the Manuel Montt Prize, and in May In 1995, he organized, together with other national and foreign philosophers, the International Colloquium "Spinoza: theology, ethics and politics." The meeting was an effort to think about the relevance of Spinoza's work, as a thought of power and liberation, in the context of the transition to democracy. During that same year, he participated in the founding of the UNESCO Chair of Philosophy, the first chair of philosophy in the world, based in Santiago de Chile. He was President from its founding until the end of his life in 2014.

Doctor Honoris Causa of the University of Paris VIII and National Prize
In 1997, the work "Del bien que se espera y del bien que se debe" was published, and the following year, in 1998, he was named a full member of the Chilean Academy of Language and received the title of Doctor Honoris Causa of the University of Paris VIII in France. In 1999, his thesis "The Metaphysics of Language" was published, with which he obtained the title of State Professor of Philosophy almost four decades earlier. That same year he was awarded the National Prize for Humanities and Social Sciences, whose assignment was supported by the prominent Italian philosopher Gianni Vattimo, among others.

During the government of Ricardo Lagos, in 2001, he was given the position of Scientific and Technological Attaché of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Italy, which he resigned to return to academic life and dedicate himself exclusively to philosophy and to teaching it until his last days. During that year, "The Passing of Time and its Measure (Temporality in Aristotle, with Commentary by Saint Thomas Aquinas and Other Notes)" was published.

Some years later, he published "Heroic Reason (Socrates and the Oracle of Delphi)", a work in which he exposes the last days of the life of Socrates in the style of a play. In 2007, the first edition of “La metafísica eres tú” was published, a work for which he received the Altazor Prize for essays in 2009. He also received, in 2008, the Consejo Nacional del libro y la Lectura Prize.