A morning with Fina Birulés

Even when the world seems incomprehensible, full of contradictions, pain, and unease, we mustn’t stop trying to understand it. We mustn’t turn our backs on it or give in to melancholy. Understanding is a never-ending task that is with us all our lives, helping us to ensure that the world doesn’t become alien to us. Pretending that the world doesn’t exist may offer temporary feelings of relief. At the end of the day, though, renouncing the possibility of acting in the world means surrendering our own responsibility to others.

This quest to understand the world is the foundation of philosophy. It is also the endeavour that characterises the work of Hannah Arendt, a thinker with her own voice, and one who Fina Birulés has extensively studied. In fact, she has recently published the book Hannah Arendt: el món en joc (Hannah Arendt: The World at Stake, Arcàdia, 2023). Citing Arendt and other renowned thinkers, in this session Birulés upholds the role of philosophy as the art of asking questions, as necessary for understanding a time that is full of injustice and inequality, and for thinking about action and freedom.

The session has a pedagogical dossier (in Catalan) so that the students can work on the contents beforehand in the classroom and thus make the most out of the lecture.