Miguel de Beistegui

A philosopher and ICREA Research Professor at the Pompeu Fabra University of Barcelona, Miguel de Beistegui, with a long career working in the field of twentieth-century German and French Philosophy, has written about Heidegger, Deleuze, Proust, Chillida, and Lacan. His main areas of interest include ontology, metaphysics, aesthetics, ethics, and politics. At present he is exploring the notions of desire and also of crisis as a permanent state of contemporaneity. In this area, he has written the essay “Towards a Philosophy of Crisis (Research in Phenomenology, 2022) and is presently writing the book Philosophy in a Time of Crisis, which aims to produce a rigorous concept of crisis that would help in confronting our present situation. Notable among his more recent works are Thought Under Threat: On Superstition, Spite, and Stupidity (The University of Chicago Press, 2022), in which he contemplates the forces (or “vices”) that diminish agency and the ability to think critically. His academic training has been associated with institutions including Paris-I Pantheon Sorbonne University, Loyola University, Chicago, and the Hegel-Archiv, Bochum, Germany, and he taught Philosophy at the University of Warwick, United Kingdom, for more than twenty-five years.