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Considering the current democratic crisis and one of its many manifestations, this paper explores the concepts of tertium datur (Echeverría) and dissimulazione onesta (Accetto) from the perspectives of agonistic logic (Unamuno/Mouffe) and Baroque artifice (Gracián) with the aim of challenging the unfair logic that sustains our contemporary world and of outlining a counter-hegemonic alternative of action against the current uniformitarianism (Badiou) of Western politics. This paper's hypothesis maintains that the implementation of the logic of tertium datur, with its honest form of dissimulation, is an alternative that, widely disseminated during the hispanic Baroque, could be reconsidered as a way of combating the current situation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

RESUMEN: Unamuno leía libros de sermones, se dejaba influir por ellos, los acotaba y hasta escribía sermones propios, descritos por él como "sermones laicos con sus tintes protestantes." En este ensayo, explicamos lo que Unamuno entendía por tales sermones y, para ser precisos, empleamos la definición del protestante no sectario (como Unamuno) Dr. Pedro A. Jiménez. Un ejemplo espléndido es "¡Plenitud de plenitudes y todo plenitud!" Examinamos la Meditación evangélica "El mal del siglo," mina para los temas de futuros sermones de Unamuno, todos dependientes del pensamiento protestante. Asimismo, analizamos "¿Qué es la verdad?"; "Nicodemo el fariseo"; "¡Pistis y no gnosis!" y su versión corregida "La fe"; "El buen ladrón"; "Principios de dolores de parto"; y dos sermones versificados: "Del Sinaí al Calvario" y "Fatalidad." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article shows that, in Miguel de Unamuno, both philosophy and literature contribute to an intellectual project that has to do with life. I will argue that Unamuno, in Cómo se hace una novela, presents a philosophy of life that understands human life as an intersubjective creation. We create life in the same way we do a novel, that is to say, through intersubjective dialectics. Cómo se hace una novela reveals an idea about life in which our ontological potential manifests itself in the novelistic creation and where the text becomes an intersubjective common ground. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article aims to present Miguel de Unamuno as a literary critic of Portuguese literature and as a thinker of the “tierras de Portugal” who decisively impacts the narrative progress and the ethical-aesthetic meanings of the novel The year of the death of Ricardo Reis, published by José Saramago already in end of the 20th century (1984). From a dialogical perspective, we bring the Saramago from the 1980s and Unamuno (Basque intellectual from the first half of the 20th century, who died in 1936) together, to inscribe them into the heart of Iberian culture, in order to think about the literary and historical connections between the beginning and end of the “century of extremes” (Hobsbawm, 2008) in Portugal. We focus, above all, on unamunian thought about Portugal and Portuguese literature expressed in the works Por tierras de Portugal y de España (Unamuno, 1911) and Portugal povo de suicidas, a collection of essays by Unamuno published in Portugal, in 1986, highlighting the sepulchral tone of these critical notes. With the contribution of studies by Carlos Reis (2022) about Saramaguian prose, we discuss death and self-inflicted death in the construction of the 1984’s publication and evaluate the permanence of Unamunian thought in the poetics of the Portuguese Nobel Prize winner [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the following essay I want to explore what religious faith could be from the perspective of the artist situated at the border with the religious sphere, taking as a reference-point the thought of the 19th century Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, more exactly, the masterpiece of his pseudonym Johannes de Silentio, Fear and Trembling (1843); my interest is to describe the ambiguous role of the aesthetic imagination in matters of christian faith, keeping my view permanently in the perspective of the original existential thought, in an attempt to reshape the historical conflict/reconciliation between reason and faith. The conclusion that emerges from my study is that today people will have to stop associating the relationship with God strictly with affectivity, or with knowledge (the teaching), redefining it in a tragic existential framework, as a post-reflective experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

“The Useful Passion: Death and the Meaning of Life in Miguel de Unamuno”. The bourgeois attitude towards death is to postpone it and forget it. The meaning of our existence is, then, to lengthen life as much as possible. Heidegger understands death as the most authentic possibility of human beings: human beings are there to die. In Unamuno the desire to live of the hunger for immortality is grounded on the awareness of having to die; at the same time, having to die implies the hunger for immortality. This is the tragic sense of life. Absolute death implies the complete lack of sense. Thus, human beings would be a useless passion. In the hunger for immortality there is, therefore, a profound affirmation of the meaning of life as a struggle for meaning. Although nothingness awaits us, let’s turn this into an injustice: that is, act in such a way that you do not deserve to die, that you deserve eternity and meaning. Against the metaphysical nihilism of Mephistopheles, hope is thus grounded. Therefore, this passion is useful since we are only able to relate to eternity and meaning by deserving them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Miguel de Unamuno's religiosity consists of the struggle to believe, represented in one of his famous characters: San Manuel Bueno, martyr, a priest who cannot believe, although he would like to. We need to believe, and so we believe in God, but reason contradicts our belief in faith. Thus, we find a certain agony and anguish in this struggle to believe, which is nothing more than the attempt to reconcile faith and reason, idea very present and which breaks through in the work of our thinker. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"Echeverría and Unamuno, Baroque and Antagonism. An Articulation of the Baroque Ethos and the Tragic Ethos". This paper seeks to sketch a possible articulation of the tragic ethos and the baroque ethos. The starting point is Echeverría's hypothesis concerning the baroque character of Unamuno's Quijote. I argue that such a baroque ethos --an attitude, a behaviour, and a vital strategy-- as defined by the Ecuadorian philosopher, goes beyond Unamuno's Quijote, and is linked to the tragic ethos of Unamuno's agonism. I follow Saéz Rueda's hypothesis that, on the one side, Unamuno's agonism is closely related to the baroque attitude and, on the other side, that there are at least two unifying bonds between the Baroque and the tragic. I propose that it is possible to add two more bonds. The first one has to do with the understanding of action shared by Echevarría and Unamuno, the choice of a third that cannot be. The second bond considers that such a community of attitude, of ethos, between the tragic and the Baroque can be established from the moral pedagogic function of the tragic and baroque works. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Resulta interesante considerar ciertas reelaboraciones del mito de Antígona en el marco de la relación entre irracionalismo y tragedia durante el contexto del exilio y de la posguerra civil española. Tanto La tumba de Antígona de María Zambrano como La sangre de Antígona de José Bergamín señalan—a partir de sus semejanzas y también de sus diferencias—una cierta conciencia sobre el declive de la razón. Asimismo, la diversa valoración que exhiben con respecto a la existencia de un nuevo saber experiencial—de herecia unamuniana—ayuda a comprender el contraste de ambas miradas sobre la tragedia como fuente de conocimiento. It is interesting to consider certain reworkings of the myth of Antigone in the context of the relationship between irrationalism and tragedy in the context of exile and the post-Spanish Civil War period. Both La tumba de Antígona by María Zambrano and La sangre de Antígona by José Bergamín point out—from their similarities and also their differences—a certain awareness about the decline of reason. Likewise, the different valuation they show in relation to the existence of a new experiential knowledge—of Unamunian heritage—helps to understand the contrast of both views on tragedy as a source of knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Both in Hispanic and Chinese philology we usually understand the term idyll as a composition, of pastoral and bucolic character. However, from an aesthetic point of view, it has a more complex meaning, as explained by the Russian thinker Mikhail Bakhtin. Following the interpretation of the idyll by Bakhtin and Beltrán Almería, we will observe the destruction of the family idyll in Modernity from two works by Miguel de Unamuno and Ba Jin, Aunt Tula and Family. Both have had great resonance in Hispanic and Chinese literature, respectively. Their authors occupy places of honor in modern Spanish and Chinese literatures. Literary research on Ba Jin is not developed in Spain. Likewise, Unamuno's novels have not yet received the attention they deserve to have in China. This study aims to approach the common aesthetics (the destruction of the idyll) that founds both novels. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The turn of the twentieth century witnessed the beginning of an evolution in the model of womanhood, giving way to a transformation in the gender relations that had existed up to that point. Little by little, the "feminine world" inserted itself into aspects of the masculine sphere, including the editorial staff at newspapers. Within this context, this article undertakes an analysis of the correspondence sent by twenty-five women journalists to Miguel de Unamuno in the first half of the twentieth century. The letters were selected from the corpus of female correspondence preserved in the Casa-Museo Unamuno at the Universidad de Salamanca. Using a qualitative methodology, this article reflects on the ideas, anxieties, and concerns that these women journalists shared with the famous Spanish writer. The results allow us to explore the thoughts and lifestyles of the first women who began to work as journalists during Unamuno's lifetime. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Unamuno's interest in Classical fables, mainly those influenced by Aesopus, goes beyond the alleged fable's morals. After practising a meticulous analysis of its elements and also an effective critique, he theorized about what surrounded the genre: its structure, its teachings, etc.; but he also assimilated Aesopus' fables to his own works under different genres and adapted them to his interests as well as illustrated intertextuality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article aims to establish an aesthetic relation between Nuevo Mundo (1895-1896) by Miguel de Unamuno and Declaración de un vencido (1887) by Alejandro Sawa. So as to compare the texts, a strategy of analysis is proposed, taking into account three criteria: the argument, the enunciation and the concept of the protagonist in the two novels. In parallel, a model of the modernist novel is established, resulting from the confrontation of Spanish prose fiction with the European and, to a lesser extent, Latin American modernist novel. The adopted method allows to confirm that both texts tell a story of a frustrated artist (decadent hero) and turn to a narrative perspective deliberately directed towards the inside of the protagonist. Relying on characters that combine the condition of the writer with journalistic activity, both Sawa and Unamuno depict a search for the basis of the position of the artist/intellectual in a changing and chaotic reality ruled by the laws of the market, a search which may be found in many European and Spanish modernist novels. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study focuses on the personal lecture that the Greek poet C. Cavafis and the Spanish poet M. de Unamuno carried out -both inspired by a passage of Dante - in their respective poems «Che fece...il gran rifiuto» (1901) and «La gran rehusa» (1910). These poems are analysed in the first place separately, stressing above all the repercussions they had on the literary critics. Finally, both poems are examined comparatively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Tragic Sense of Life was one of Miguel de Unamuno's great philosophical-religious contributions. It is true that next to his tragic conception of existence we find juxtaposed concepts as fundamental and decisive as those of conatus essendi, life struggle, faith and God, but, while admitting these, in the present study we address only the polemical and anguished relation that pistis has with gnosis, or in other words, that faith has with reason, in relation to the ultimate fate of individual consciences. Thus we attempt to highlight the most characteristic and symbolic traits of human existence as conceptualized by Unamuno at the turn of the 19th to the 20th century, when positivism and phenomenology seemed to challenge metaphysics as a legitimate branch of knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholars interested in Miguel de Unamuno's obsession with Don Quixote usually refer to his Quixotism as a philosophy or "way of life" that Unamuno eventually outgrew. Unamuno himself called Quixotism a philosophy and an ethics, but he also called it a religion. This is the most accurate characterization of Quixotism, given how it functioned in both his works and his life. Unamuno's Quixotism incorporates many typical religious features like a god figure, followers, worship, an idea of faith, an eschatology, and a sacred text. This essay: 1) paints Quixotism as a religion and shows how it functioned throughout Unamuno's works, and 2) argues that Quixotism was not a phase for Unamuno. Unamuno created and practiced the religion of Quixotism throughout his life, even as he was wrestling with Christianity, so that a comprehensive understanding of Unamuno's struggle with faith must include the study of his Quixotism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper introduces, examines, and compares affinities and divergences of L. N. Tolstoy's (1828-1910) and Miguel de Unamuno's (1864-1936) views on the role of women in Kreutzer Sonata (1889) and La Tia Tula (1921) in the nineteenth century Russia and Spain. The focus of this paper is to explore both writers' attitudes towards women in their novels. Tolstoy's and Unamuno's views on marriage, sex and maternity will also be examined. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article, within the framework of the reception theory, emphasizes the importance of the reader in the updating of a literary work. The analysis of Miguel de Unamuno's book The Life of Don Quixote and Sancho demonstrates how the personal experiences of the reader influence the interpretation of a literary work, providing it with new meanings. In The Life of Don Quixote and Sancho, Miguel de Unamuno creates his personal and very intimate version of Cervantes's novel. The reading of Don Quixote makes Unamuno delve deeper into the key topics of his literary and philosophical works: immortality, religion, love, justice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present study considers the role and function that humor has in Unamuno's intellectual and literary universe. It traces Unamuno's attitude toward humor to his reading of the Spanish character inEn torno al casticismo(1895) and to his dialogue with the figure of Don Quixote, as found inVida de Don Quijote y Sancho(1905) andDel sentimiento trágico de la vida(1912). Finally, it looks at the theory of humor offered in the novelNiebla(1914) and also at the role that humor played in Unamuno's later political writings, especially those of exile (1924–1930). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Miguel de Unamuno is recognized the world over as one of Spain's greatest writers ever, and his prose works, especially his novels, have been subjected to intense critical study for more than half a century. Yet despite his being recognized as a major poet by younger Spanish poets such as Juan Ramón Jiménez and Luis Cernuda, Unamuno's poetry, compared to his prose, has received much less attention in Spain and virtually none outside Spain, such has been the fascination exerted on academia by his fictional and quasi-philosophical works. The present article argues that it is high time that a part of this scholarly enthusiasm was deflected towards his poetry, which Unamuno himself treasured far more than the rest of his sprawling work. The article focuses on one of Unamuno's dominant interests: the role of language in our lives, and especially language as the prompter and facilitator of the human imagination. A significant proportion of his poetic output revolves around our love of words and the effect this has on our beliefs and assumptions. He raises questions which, though often unanswered, point to intriguing facets of our language-dominated existence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This piece of research focuses on the expression of identity through photography. A comparative study was undertaken of two iconic collections belonging to some Spanish public figures, whose lives spanned a period from the late nineteenth century to the first third of the twentieth century. Specifically, the family photograph albums of Miguel de Unamuno and Joaquín Turina were analysed by using a technique based on the representation of social networks. This showed the importance of studying the coincidences between the people featured in the photographs in terms of revealing the social component of their identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This piece of research focuses on the expression of identity through photography. A comparative study was undertaken of two iconic collections belonging to some Spanish public figures, whose lives spanned a period from the late nineteenth century to the first third of the twentieth century. Specifically, the family photograph albums of Miguel de Unamuno and Joaquín Turina were analysed by using a technique based on the representation of social networks. This showed the importance of studying the coincidences between the people featured in the photographs in terms of revealing the social component of their identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the importance of doubt in Western philosophy, with particular attention to the work of Søren Kierkegaard and Miguel de Unamuno. Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous author Johannes Climacus ventures down the pathway of doubt, finds it perplexing and difficult and discovers that he is unable to return to his pre-doubting self. In despair, the meaningfulness of his life is called into question. Unamuno, a great admirer of Kierkegaard, acknowledges the suffering that accompanies doubt while affirming the pivotal role of uncertainty, despair and struggle in realising our humanity. From Unamuno, we can acquire a keener sense of the part education has to play in both forming us as doubting beings and allowing us to work constructively with the despair engendered by this formation. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This essay takes José Ortega y Gasset’s famous comment ‘yo soy yo y mi circunstancia’ and Kaja Silverman’s view that perception is always ‘propped’ on things we have seen before and retraces the ‘circunstancias’ of the development of visual studies within British Hispanism, then considers the making of the ‘parque escultórico’ in the Canary Island of Fuerteventura. Linking the development of the this sculpture park to Unamuno’s exile on the island, when he took to walking around the capital, then known as Puerto de Cabras, this essay takes a contemporaryviaje al azararound the public art that is now located in the present-day capital, now known as Puerto del Rosario. It argues that the creation of the ‘parque escultórico’ is an attractive contemporary visual case study: as an example of how far the discipline has developed since the time when writers like Unamuno and Ortega y Gasset were the mainstay of the Hispanic Studies literary curriculum; as an example of what can be achieved when the ‘circunstancias’ of local government, artist and viewer are embraced from the start; and as a model for sustainable cultural development in times of economic recession. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The approximation to the figure and thought of Unamuno to one of the early works of Kazantzakis, specifically Comedia, allows to generate an interesting dialogue between the authors. In these intellectuals one can observe a "heterodoxy" which confronts them to the spirit of the time under an attitude of protest towards the abuse of reason and the breaking of totalizing discourses. Both authors search a way out by means of the individual. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is a response to Fowers, Ainsley, and Lefevor, who offer a critique of a previously published article of ours that explored the problems of grounding aspiration and virtue in any ontology that does not allow for the possibility of an eternal soul. In this article, we argue that Fowers et al. have seriously misunderstood the nature and intent of our original argument and, therefore, fail to adequately respond to what we take to be a central concern that limits the viability of any approach to virtue and aspiration grounded in a naturalistic ontology for addressing the "Wherefore" question that lies at the heart of virtue and aspiration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cervantes' Don Quixote has produced a rich exegetical tradition since its publication four centuries ago. A long-standing reading tradition has described it as the foundation of the modern realist novel. An also well-established reading tradition, not necessarily opposed to the other one, has stressed an element of semiotic indeterminacy and instability of meaning as its major attribute. This article focuses on the readings of four twentieth-century writers: Miguel de Unamuno, Franz Kafka, Jorge Luis Borges, and Milan Kundera. How did these writers place themselves in relation to those reading traditions? In what ways do their texts interact with Cervantes' novel and with the multiple elements it has to offer? This essay highlights aspects of Don Quixote that the readings of these four writers reveal, while at the same time reflecting on aspects of their own poetics that their readings serve to clarify. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In today's world we appear to place a premium on happiness. Happiness is often portrayed, directly or indirectly, as one of the key aims of education. To suggest that education is concerned with promoting unhappiness or even despair would, in many contexts, seem outlandish. This paper challenges these widely held views. Focusing on the work of the great Russian writer, Fyodor Dostoevsky, I argue that despair, the origins of which lie in our reflective consciousness, is a defining feature of human life. Education, I maintain, should not be seen as a flight from despair but as a process of deepening our understanding of suffering and its potentially pivotal role in our humanisation. In developing these ideas, I draw on Kierkegaard's The Sickness Unto Death and Unamuno's The Tragic Sense of Life in Men and Nations, among other sources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents anthropological thought of Miguel de Unamuno. The religious aspect expresses the essence of the Spanish writer's thought. In the development of his mind three important authors have influenced Western philosophy: St. Augustine, Pascal and Kierkegaard. This paper studies the relationships between them and with them again proposes the question of God as a philosophical problem. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that the prevailing theories, models, and explanations of contemporary psychology, in large part because they reflect the assumptions of reductive naturalism, provide an understanding of our human being such that aspiration—to the higher, the more noble, and the more meaningful—becomes not only unreasonable, but impossible. Indeed, such thinking in the discipline marks the death of aspiration. The paper further argues, following the work of Unamuno, Levinas, and Marion, that genuine aspiration is possible and reasonable only in the context of a temporal continuity of the soul, the existence of an other to whom we are obligated, and the possibility of loving with no expectation of reciprocity. Such a context, in turn, is possible only under a particular set of assumptions about our human being that operate on the ontological level. These assumptions, which include that we are innately possessed of meaningful intelligence, that we can, in fact, anticipate temporal continuity, that we are moral agents inhabiting a moral world, and that we are capable of genuine human intimacy, are presented as an alternative starting point for a psychology which does more than toll the death of aspiration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From a significant number of sources, it is possible to build a biography of Federico de Onís that could make a characterization of an era of reforms that became widespread in Spain in the early twentieth century, often inspired, but not exclusively, by the ideas of the Institución Libre de Enseñanza and the teaching of Francisco Giner. This article will lay the foundations for this work and for this central figure in the dissemination of Spanish culture in the United States. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article considers the notion of the shadow and its traditional meanings across the centuries in areas such as folklore, literature, and psychology, focusing on its importance in Gothic texts and certain characters found there, including the vampire and the Doppelgänger. It goes on to consider the motif of the shadow that separates from the body that casts it and what that can signify in different contexts, leading to a study of Miguel de Unamuno's essay 'La sombra sin cuerpo'. Here it is argued that three different but interlinked elements can be discerned in his treatment of the theme: a transnational Gothic aspect drawn from Adalbert von Chamisso's novella, Peter Schlemiel; a Hispanic one, which relates the shadow to honour; and a typically Unamunian one whereby it articulates some of his perennial questions about the human condition and existential (in)dependence relative to the creator. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author seeks to paint a portrait of the Basque writer, Miguel de Unamuno. Based on testimonials from other writers and the works of the controversial Rector of the University of Salamanca, a depiction of one of the most important Spanish authors takes shape. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The great story of don Quijote is the first novel in the literary West which attempts to restore the lost gestures (of mercy, chivalry, generosity, morality, and politicality as common interest), or rather bring them within the range of remembrance of the new epoch. Or, in the words of G. Agamben, "it tries for the last time to evoke that which threatens to elude it forever". The insanity of the epoch is manifest primarily through the insanity related to "loss of control over the gestures"; thus a demented gesticulation with absolute gestures of power becomes a universal symptom. It is precisely to this insanity of his time that the insane don Quijote responds with imagined or imaginary pure gestures of pure chivalry. This is the code of don Quijote's insanity: everyone claims that he alone is insane, but no one is aware that they themselves have fallen into the trap of insanity. The historical events testify to this fall into insanity, to the forgetting of every genuine chivalrous gesture, first and foremost towards adversaries, women, children, the elderly and the politically deprived. The end of religious tolerance is connected with the collapse of chivalrous idealism. The unhappy or lost mankind has lost its gestures of chivalry, morality and politicality, and this is the hour of the cruel world of outright political violence. The centre of this world of dismay is the court as "the court of death", as the image of "evil giants" and "colossuses" which it sends forth from its deadly womb as the sole life-forces. Presently the court spreads the seed of wizardry as the seed of death to all corners of the world, as well as all arbitrary powers, from wizarding to nuclear, both in the present and in the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this article is that of rendering an outline of the philosophical basis that is implied in the existential agony that is perceived through Miguel de Unamuno's work Aunt Tula. In order of fulfilling this purpose, a comparison has been made of this author's thought and that of Kierkegaard, the idea of immortality being the link between both. From this perspective of analysis, the fight between faith and reason, exposed by Unamuno, states clearly that the longing for immortality faces universal categories, while for Kierkegaard, faith is above reason no matter how absurd any decision can seem to be. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]