Joan-Carles Melich

Joan-Carles Mèlich Sangrà is a Catalan philosopher and professor of Philosophy of Education at the Autonomous University of Barcelona. In 1991 he was appointed full professor in the area of Theory and History of Education at the Faculty of Educational Sciences of the Autonomous University of Barcelona.

He is the author of an extensive body of essays in philosophy, ethics and pedagogy, focused since the mid-1990s on the notion of finitude, with philosophical, literary and cinematic references. In 2022 he received the National Essay Award, with the work La fragilidad del mundo: Essayo sobre un tiempo precario (2021).

Education is a central axis of his thinking: he understands the educational relationship as a dual, intimate and asymmetrical relationship, of an ethical nature. In this framework, he gives a fundamental role to memory and testimony, which he claims as essential faculties to situate the human being in the world.

Featured works

Philosophy of finitude. The philosophy outlined here attempts to show the fragility and vulnerability of life and to think about ethics and education from this perspective.

The fragility of the world. An essay on a precarious time. This essay represents a determined openness to the complexity and ambivalence of the world, also to its dark and painful aspects.

Education as an ethical event. Co-authored with Fernando Bárcena. The book tries to think of ethics as the condition of possibility of every educational bond; ethics understood not as something that is at the foundation (epistemological and ontological) of education.