Barcelona Pensa's 24-hour philosophy marathon starts today

Barcelona Pensa festival aims to repeat this marathon format every two years, alternating it with the biannual one-week festival.
Barcelona Pensa festival aims to repeat this marathon format every two years, alternating it with the biannual one-week festival.
Culture
(15/11/2017)

Barcelona Pensa, promoted by the Faculty of Philosophy of the UB, takes the shape of a marathon for this year: on Thursday November 16, the World Philosophy Day, several places in Barcelona will hold activities related to this discipline for twenty-four hours. Some previous activities, on Wednesday November 15, will serve as a prelude for this activity. The marathon will start with a philosopy cabaret before the midnight of November 16.

 

Barcelona Pensa festival aims to repeat this marathon format every two years, alternating it with the biannual one-week festival.
Barcelona Pensa festival aims to repeat this marathon format every two years, alternating it with the biannual one-week festival.
Culture
15/11/2017

Barcelona Pensa, promoted by the Faculty of Philosophy of the UB, takes the shape of a marathon for this year: on Thursday November 16, the World Philosophy Day, several places in Barcelona will hold activities related to this discipline for twenty-four hours. Some previous activities, on Wednesday November 15, will serve as a prelude for this activity. The marathon will start with a philosopy cabaret before the midnight of November 16.

 

 The marathon will start with a philosophy cabaret before midnight. During the night there will be a lecture on philosophies which the organizers call “nocturnal”: Orphism, cynicism, symbolism and Satanism. Afterwards, the marathon will continue in Centre Cívic Golferichs with a lecture on cosmology about “the most passionate moments of star science until the current scientific perspective of the universe”, and a roundtable on the connection between arts and thinking with the night. Early in the morning, at 6 a.m., the festival will move to Llibreria Calders, where there will be some readings of texts from different authors, commemorating some ephemerides this year (Stefan Zweig, Joan Fuster, Simone de Beauvoir). A morning talk will lead to morning activities which take place in several places around the city.

The Faculty of Philosophy of the UB will gather groups of children from different schools of Barcelona who take part in the Innovation and Research on Teaching Philosophy (IREF). During the whole day, the Faculty will show the paintings and other materials made by the kids. The Faculty will also hold a philosophy Olympiad between high school student teams, who will work on their dialectic skills. There will also be the book presentation for Ser, by José Luis Cañadas, dedicated to Philosophy for kids. The day before, the Faculty will hold the award ceremony for the annual contest of Photophilosophy, aimed at high school students.

Pati Manning will be another scenario for this marathon and it will hold many activities: the central conference, titled “Pensar la revolució”, given by César Renduelles; the session “Pensa la mort”, three “café-philo” on evil, ugliness, and falsehood: and a roundtable titles “Dones del mon, dones al món”, which will analyse the role of women in philosophy, science, new technologies, culture and politics. In the same place, at noon, lecturers from the Faculty of Pharmacy and Food Sciences of the UB and the University School of Tourism, Hospitality and Gastronomy, an UB affiliated school, will carry out a workshop focused on bread: it will explain the different ways in which we present and conceptualize bread and the reflections will have a bit of bread snacks as the main character.

The festival will go around the streets of Barcelona with guided tours in the Museum of the History of Barcelona, Palau de la Virreina, cultural facilities of Fabra i Coats, and a philosophy tour around the city including several institutions historically related to philosophy.

Some of the activities on Wednesday 15 will be a roundtable with students from the University of Experience of the UB, a session on the dangerous speech and the power of words, and the book presentation for El monolingüisme de lʼaltre, by Jacques Derrida, and Apories de la vida quotidiana, by Nemrod Carrasco.

Barcelona Pensa festival aims to repeat this marathon format every two years, alternating it with the biannual one-week festival to come back on the edition of 2018. Always going for the philosophical thinking as the fundamental feature of a participating culture in which everyone can feel involved, the project aims to turn the philosophical speech into a common and shared good, which removes the traditional barrier between high and low cultures and turns theoretical thought into a basic element of experience.