Thursday, January 30, 2025, from 5:00 pm to 6:30 pm at the Observatorio Cervantes at Harvard (2 Arrow St, 4th Floor, Cambridge, MA)
This in-person event will be conducted in Spanish. RSVP here.
On Thursday, January 30, Prof. Ilia Galán will present the lecture titled “De la filosofía española a través de la literatura.” Histories of Spanish philosophy, such as Abellán’s, include Don Quixote, Life Is a Dream, and the works of St. John of the Cross and St. Teresa of Ávila, among other landmarks of Spanish literature. Jorge Santayana, in his Three Philosophical Poets: Lucretius, Dante, and Goethe, carried on this tradition and, not coincidentally, cultivated the novel as a genre. Many philosophers have notably used literary forms to express unique models of knowledge.
The boundaries between philosophy and literature are fluid. Literary fiction often embraces philosophical knowledge and reflections with a rigor comparable to that of philosophical treatises. Literature can serve as philosophy—and occasionally does. Similarly, philosophy, inevitably conveyed through language, sometimes manifests poetically or within fictional frameworks.
Ilia Galán’s presentation will explore philosophy as expressed in artistic—specifically literary—works. He will discuss examples from Spanish lyric poetry, narrative, and theater that develop philosophical insights in ways distinctly different from academic texts.
Ilia Galán is a professor of Aesthetics and Theory of the Arts at Carlos III University of Madrid and has been a visiting professor at Oxford, Harvard, the Sorbonne, and New York University. Additionally, he is a regular columnist for El País and other newspapers. Among his books are El Dios de los dioses (Ciencia del arte), 1993; El romanticismo: Schelling o el arte divino, 1999; Teorías del arte desde el siglo XXI, 2005; Sabiduría oculta en el Camino de Santiago, 2011; Filosofía del caos, estética y otras artes, 2011; Orígenes de la filosofía en español (Actualidad del pensamiento de Santob), 2013 (winner of the International Samuel Toledano Prize, Jerusalem, 2014); El romanticismo y sus mutaciones actuales, 2013; La estética de los compositores contemporáneos, 2014; El Castillo: Teresa de Jesús ante Kafka, 2015; Pulsión sagrada hacia el misterio (Antonio Colinas. ¿Poesía, mística o metafísica?), 2016; Homo o cyborg politicus, 2018; and Conversaciones con Luis de Pablo (Vida y obra de un compositor), 2022. His work has been translated into multiple languages.