Jorge Luis Borges dedicates a poem to Descartes titled 'Descartes' which is integrated into the poetry collection La xifra (1981), and in which he adopts the poetic voice of the philosopher himself and poetically meditates on dreams, the symbolic representation of Cartesian doubt, methodical doubt, and the metaphysical and epistemological consequences, as it affects both existence itself and the nature of reality, as well as the rational capacity to know the world. The poem also includes more vital verses, in which he disorderly reviews some events of his life.

Etymologically, ‘radical’ comes from the Latin ‘radicalis’ which means ‘relating to the root’. It is a term linked to plant biology, and more specifically, to plants. In principle, it does not have a symbolic character. It refers directly to the lower part of a plant, generally underground, which anchors it to the soil and absorbs water and nutrients. Initially, therefore, ‘radical’ has a neutral, apolitical meaning, far from any ideology.

Heraclitus is present in Catalan literature through Joan Brossa and especially Josep Palau i Fabre, an admirer of the Ephesian philosopher and his doctrine of fire and the eternally burning flame. His interest resulted in the book The clarity of Heraclitus (Accent, 2007), a highly personal, speculative, and extra-academic interpretation of the preserved fragments, which seeks to provide a unified meaning and avoids strict historical verisimilitude. Palau i Fabre's Heraclitus is solitary, distrustful of his contemporaries, religious, aristocratic, and proud, confident in his logos, convinced of the superiority of death and destruction over life, and of the constant action of violence as the law of the universe.

The first work by Albert Camus translated into Catalan is the novel The plague (Vergara, 1962), originally published in France by Gallimard in 1947. It appeared in 1962, fifteen years after its French publication, in a translation by Joan Fuster, as part of Vergara's 'Isard' paperback collection. Joan Fuster's role was key in introducing and disseminating Camus's thought to Catalan-speaking readers. The translation of the novel The plague The Catalan translation was commissioned by his editor and personal friend Josep Maria Boix, promoter of the 'Isard' collection. Previously, Fuster had attempted to translate the drama into Catalan. The respectful whore Fuster attempted a translation of Sartre's work on his own, just six years after its original publication—a very short time considering the opacity and cultural isolation imposed by the Franco regime. Unfortunately, it failed due to the text's difficulty and limitations. This failed attempt already reveals a clear desire to normalize and Europeanize Catalan culture, so damaged by Francoist prohibition, persecution, and censorship. Fuster's open-minded and committed approach is reflected in his translations of four other works by Camus during the 1960s: The Stranger (Proa, 1967), translated alone; The myth of Sisyphus (1965), the foundational essay of absurdism or philosophy of the absurd; the philosophical treatise The rebel man (1966) and the six stories grouped under the title of Exile and the Kingdom (1967), in collaboration with Josep Palàcios. It can be said that Fuster, with his literary career, further enhanced the prestige of the translated works.

In his poems, Jorge Luis Borges reflects on time and its effects through the lens of Heraclitus, the Obscure. As the Ephesian philosopher said, we are like water flowing continuously in a river, water that is never the same, because the passage of time changes us and leads us toward our ultimate destiny, which is death. He also cites other pre-Socratic philosophers: Thales of Miletus, the Eleatics Parmenides and Zeno, Anaxagoras, Pythagoras and the Pythagoreans, and Democritus. Borges delves into the relationship between time and space through Parmenides and especially Zeno and the paradox of Achilles and the tortoise. According to the Eleatics, time is made up of infinite, separable instants that translate into an equally infinite space. He is interested in Anaxagoras because he allows him to speak rationally about natural phenomena, such as day and night, and about night temporally following day. It refers to Thales' cosmogony, to the secret origin of the Earth that nourishes and the fire that devours all, and to water as the origin of all things. It specifically refers to Pythagoras, with metaphysical but also cosmogonic and legendary annotations. On the one hand, it highlights the Samos philosopher's vision of reality and his attunement to the universe filled with atoms that unite and divide in the void in a cyclical succession. It also echoes the custom attributed to Pythagoras of writing with his blood, as a sign of his personal commitment to the teachings he imparted. It thinks like an Eleatic when it writes that he "is not afraid, not even afraid of being afraid, nor afraid of being afraid of being afraid of infinity." It recalls the legend that attributes to Democritus the act of gouging out his eyes in order to think more clearly, to meditate, and not be led astray by the deception of the senses or the external world, and which symbolizes the Abderan philosopher's commitment to true knowledge.

Arendt is in vogue. Her thought continues to be studied and updated to understand the present, despite her being a thinker of the last century. This is an undeniable fact, given the number of books and studies dedicated to Arendt. From the outset, interest in Arendt is conditioned and mediated by the dynamism of publishers and the business decision to make her works available to readers through reissues and new editions. The publishing drive to promote Arendt's universe stems from the conviction that it is a profitable and secure investment, a market opportunity that cannot be missed. The publishing strategy takes as its starting point certain significant dates in Arendt's biography. Specifically, publishers are timing a significant portion of their publications to coincide with the commemoration in 2025 of the fiftieth anniversary of her death and the celebration in 2026 of the one hundred and twentieth anniversary of her birth. Publishers contribute to creating a trend and awakening public interest in Arendt, drawing on the notable increase in academic studies and works. In any case, the element that ultimately explains Arendt's enduring relevance and the unstoppable increase in publications lies in the themes she addresses, especially those linked to ethics and politics, such as militarism, violence, the hegemony of the far right, radical and banal evil, and interpretive approaches. A significant portion of the studies has focused on her political thought and, more specifically, on the study of politics as action, a space and sphere of freedom, and republican citizenship. Another set of studies has offered a radical interpretation of democracy, highlighting the agonistic dimension of politics, based on conflict and plurality. Phenomenology has been interested in studying the influence of Heidegger and Jaspers on Arendt and has explored the concept of natality and the more experiential dimension of her thought. For their part, proponents of cosmopolitanism in the Kantian tradition have seen in Arendt a cornerstone for understanding human rights within the context of the human condition of stateless persons and refugees, as well as an opportunity to assert the right to rights for these groups without state legal protection.

Beauvoir's universe in Catalan begins in 1963 with the biography Simone de Beauvoir or the failure of a ChristendomWritten by the French Dominican friar A.M. Henry, and translated by the writer Alfons Romeu. In 1966, the first Catalan translation of a work by Beauvoir appeared, by the writer and politician Ramon Xuriguera, within the 'La Mirada' collection of the Aymà publishing house. It is the essay A very sweet deathAn emotional, raw, and poignant chronicle of his mother's final days, beginning with her hospitalization after a fall and subsequent diagnosis of terminal cancer, but also intended as a broader philosophical reflection on death, old age, and suffering.

On the fiftieth anniversary of Hannah Arendt's death, I take a look at the Catalan editions of her works, starting with the outstanding contribution of the publisher Lleonard Muntaner, which began in 2006 with the translation of the Conversations with Hannah Arendtby Ramon Farrés, which includes the complete transcript of three conversations and two roundtables. The first conversation is the well-known television interview with Günter Gaus, broadcast on October 28, 1964, in which Arendt states that she does not consider herself a philosopher, defining herself instead as a political theorist. The book has an extensive epilogue by Xavier Antich, professor of aesthetics, which touches on some of the main lines of Arendt's thought. It is followed by Participate in the world (2020), a compilation of articles written for the German-language Jewish magazine Aufbau during the period of exile, between 1941 and 1945, translated by Anna Soler Horta. The edition includes an appendix with the minutes of the 1942 meetings of the Young Jewish Group in New York, featuring prominent contributions by Arendt, translated by Edgar Straehle. Lleonard Muntaner Publishers' contribution to the dissemination of Arendt's work is further enhanced by the publication of Civil disobedience (2022) and Personal responsibility under the dictatorship (2025), translated by Dolors Udina.

In the context of the French Baroque, Blaise Pascal wrote some thoughts with an eminently religious and Christian content, and an apologetic purpose in defense of the Christian religion and the Jansenist version based on the Bible and the belief in miracles, prophecies, and mysteries, in opposition to other monotheistic religions, to the Protestant. The thoughts are notes and fragments published posthumously in 1670, without following the author's recommendations regarding their ordering. According to the order provided by Pascal, the fragments were to be grouped thematically into thoughts on vanity, misery, boredom, amusement, immortality, Christian morality, and 20 other topics, and end with a conclusion. These instructions have been followed in the reference Catalan edition entitled Thoughts and pamphlets (Adesiara, 2021).

One of the issues that most concerns Erasmus of Rotterdam is war. His reflections on this topic have a timeless interest. One of the most representative sayings of this concern is that "war attracts those who have not experienced it." In this long proverb, he expounds on the origin and evolution of violence since prehistory, the causes of war, contrasts the warrior and the Christian, and strives to demonstrate that the Gospels provide reasons in favor of peace and charity. He also devotes parts of his anti-war discourse to combating the arguments of war apologists. And he does not miss the opportunity to propose some global solutions, such as creating international organizations with the purpose of fostering understanding between peoples, laying the foundations for a peaceful relationship with the Turks, and exercising effective control over the absolute power of monarchs that would prevent unilateral declarations of war.

Desideri Erasmus, better known as Erasmus of Rotterdam, has a special appreciation for proverbs, as demonstrated by the fact that he amused himself by collecting and deciphering the meaning of 4,151 learned and popular sayings, the famous Adagis (1500-1515) derived from Greco-Latin sayings and maxims. The selection is preceded by the Prolegomena, a treatise on proverbs in which he offers his own definition. He also discusses their origin and provenance, their properties and characteristics, their relationship with other genres, their values, and their educational and wisdom usefulness. Treaty It has a final section in which it makes some recommendations on its proper textual use.

Jorge Luis Borges shows his admiration for Spinoza's philosophy, dedicating two complete poems to him, entitled 'Spinoza'. The first is included in the collection The Other, the Same (1964), and the second in The Iron Coin (1976).

The experiment is Brecht's short story starring the philosopher Bacon and is a very appropriate title for a philosopher with a scientific vocation and a systematic attitude of observation of natural phenomena. In fact, Brecht presents Bacon as a scholar of natural sciences and a researcher concerned with practical issues in the field, who seeks to dominate natural forces and invent useful things. Simultaneously, it shows Bacon's darker side, linked to a series of cruel, arbitrary, and unjust decisions he made while serving as Lord Chancellor, which led him to imprisonment, albeit for a short time. Thus, Brecht completes the portrait of a two-faced Bacon, known worldwide for being a humanist and philosopher, and also for being a vengeful and unscrupulous criminal.

The writer Bertolt Brecht maintained a close relationship with philosophy, both with his questioning and reflective intellectual attitude, and through the selection of themes and content of his works, and his personal friendship with the philosopher Walter Benjamin, to whom he dedicated a poem upon receiving the news of Benjamin's suicide.

Environmentalism has focused attention on environmental degradation. Unfortunately, the data and information from ecologists, climate experts, and social scientists are inconsistent and point in the same direction: toward a significant worsening of the living conditions of humanity and the planet. They therefore confirm the global magnitude of the ecosocial crisis and indicate that we are approaching a collapse scenario. Simultaneously, as more sensitized and informed citizens have become aware of this situation of degradation and have become conscious of the moribund state of no return, they have also developed a chronic fear of the vital and existential consequences that the end of industrial civilization could bring. This is a natural and predictable psychological reaction that has become popularly known as eco-anxiety, a state of mind that affects more and more people.

The philosopher and orator Marc Tul·li Cicero, a key figure of Roman republicanism, sets out his conception of the universe and the immortality of the soul in Book VI of The Republic through a revelatory dream, the dream of Scipio, the protagonist of the philosophical dialogue. Scipio's full name is Publius Cornelius Scipio Aemilianus, Africanus Minor, and he was a prominent Roman politician and military man of the 2nd century BC. virtuous, just, and successful, and exemplary in his commitment to the common good. Philosophical and cosmological

Cicero introduces the story of the dream as a kind of philosophical and cosmological epilogue, an appendix to his political philosophy, inspired by Plato's myth of Er, in order to convey the idea that good government and virtuous conduct oriented towards the common good have the great reward of enjoying eternal life.

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Marx closes his youthful period with a letter written to his father from Berlin on November 10, 1837. In this valuable document, written at the age of 22, he justifies his lyrical vocation to his father as a necessary but outdated stage of life and casts a retrospective look at his literary output. He makes a highly self-critical assessment, especially of his poetry, which he considers excessively romantic and intellectualist. In the most heartbreaking part, he accuses himself of writing disordered and haphazardly constructed sentiments, of making "rhetorical reflections instead of poetic thoughts," and of falling into an idealistic romanticism. He tells us that he had already attempted to remedy this by introducing satire and humor into some poems, and through the writing of the experimental novel. Scorpio and Felix and the drama Oulanem.

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In this article, he recovers a forgotten and largely unknown Marx. This is a young Marx, a university student, more lyrical and enamored, idealistic and romantic, who does not fit well with the Marx universally known for promoting the overcoming of capitalism through communist revolution.

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