Cristian Soler on "Pascal and Gómez Dávila: Skeptical Ellipses and Political Revolutions"

Cristian will pretend to link the writings of two distant authors in both time and place: the seventeenth century French mathematician and writer Blaise Pascal and the twentieth century Colombian philosopher Nicolás Gómez Dávila. In order to do this, he will borrow two concepts from Severo Sarduy´s essays on the Baroque and Neo Baroque that will frame my work: ellipses and revolutions. These two words, with strong implications in Copernicus and Kepler’s astronomical models, will guide a dialogue between Pascal and Gómez Dávila on aesthetical, epistemological, theological, and political terms. With this exercise, Crisitian expects to dispute  Sarduy's conception of the Baroque as an intrinsically revolutionary aesthetic and to show how Pascal and Gómez Dávila make use of revolutionary ideas in their reactionary worldviews. 

Cristian Soler is a third year PhD student of Iberian and Latin American cultures. His interests move between philosophy and the arts and studies of the medieval, early modern, and contemporary periods.

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