María Zambrano

María Zambrano (Vélez-Málaga, 1904 – Madrid, 1991) was a Spanish philosopher and essayist associated with the Generation of 1927. Her work, which joins civic commitment with a poetic style of thought, remained largely unrecognized in Spain for decades. Today she is regarded as one of the most original philosophical voices writing in Spanish in the twentieth century.

The daughter of schoolteachers, she spent her childhood between Segovia and Madrid. In 1927 she began attending the gatherings of the Revista de Occidente, and she studied philosophy at the Central University of Madrid, where she attended the lectures of Xavier Zubiri. In 1931 she became an assistant professor in the chair of the History of Philosophy. During the Civil War she supported the Republic from the editorial board of Hora de España. After the war, exile took her through Mexico, Cuba, Puerto Rico, Rome and France, and for nearly forty years she wrote far from Spain’s intellectual life.

Her thought begins with a critique of Enlightenment rationality, which in her view had left out poetry, imagination, intuition and dreams. In their place she proposed a poetic reason, able to bring these dimensions of human experience back into knowledge. The idea appears in Philosophy and Poetry and is developed in works such as Delirium and Destiny, Person and Democracy and Antigone’s Tomb, where she returns again and again to the figure of Antigone as a symbol of loyalty to one’s own truth.

She returned to Spain in 1984, and in the following years her work began to be recovered. She received the Prince of Asturias Award in 1981 and the Cervantes Prize in 1988, becoming the first woman to win it. Her influence can be seen in studies of Spanish thought and literature, in the centers that bear her name, and in a growing interest in a philosophy that thinks through images and lyricism.