Jaume Casals, new rector of UPF

Jaume Casals Pons, Professor of Philosophy at the UPF, is the new Rector of the Pompeu Fabra University, according to the result of the vote count carried out at the end of election day on 29 April.

52.5% of the permanent teaching staff participated, of which 80% voted in favour of the candidate. Among the administrative and service staff, the participation was 42.3%, of which 52.5% voted in favour of Casals. The participation of the rest of the groups was lower, being 7.18% overall in the University.

The electoral role was made up of 13,139 electors (including students, teaching and research staff and administrative and service staff). From among the total votes issued, 54.1% were in favour of the candidate.

Jaume Casals, who was the only candidate in the election (#eleccionsUPF), replaces Josep Joan Moreso, Professor of Philosophy of Law, who was Rector of the University between the years 2005 and 2013.

The Electoral Board will proclaim Jaume Casals as the new Rector on Friday 3 May.

Bibliographical note

Born in Barcelona in 1958, Jaume Casals obtained a PhD in Philosophy from the Autonomous University of Barcelona in 1984, with the doctoral thesis The philosophy of Montaigne, supervised by Victòria Camps, with which he won the extraordinary PhD award.

After lecturing at the UAB, in 1995 he became a lecturer at the Department of Humanities of the UPFwhere, since 2003, he has been Professor of Philosophy.

He was a member of the Association of Philosophy of Barcelona (1980-1990) and Director of the Barcelona Institute of Humanities, in addition to Guest Lecturer at the Paris VII University (Denis Diderot) (1996).

He was co-director of the journal L'Avenç, contributor and member of the editorial boards of several international scientific collections devoted to Renaissance literature and philosophy and is a senior fellow of the Philosophy and Social Sciences Section of the Institute of Catalan Studies. From 2005 to 2009, he presided over the Consortium of University Libraries of Catalonia (CBUC).

He is the author of numerous philosophic works, including books, articles, chapters of collective works and notes on works by distinguished classical, modern and contemporary thinkers. He has translated and edited works by Montaigne, Montesquieu, Berkeley and Bergson, among others. Some of his most representative works are La filosofia de Montaigne [The Philosophy of Montaigne] (1986) , L'experiment d'Aristòtil. Literatura d'una incursió en la metafísica [Aristotle’s Experiment. Literature of an Incursion into Metaphysics] (1992) , El pou de la paraula. Una història de la saviesa grega [The Well of Words: A History of Greek Wisdom] (1996), and, more recently, El aprendizaje de la muerte en la historia de las ideas [Learning from Death in the History of Ideas] (2010).

His main lines of research are: the history of ancient and modern philosophy, the Greek genesis of contemporary rationality, the conflict between language and languages and, more recently, the genealogy of contemporary humanism.

At the UPF, he has held the positions of Vice-Dean (1997-2000) and Dean (2000-2001) of the Faculty of Humanities, Vice-Rector for Postgraduate and Doctoral Studies (2001-2005) and Vice-Rector for Teaching Staff (2005-2009). Since March 2009 he was President of the Academic Board and Executive Vice-President of the UPF Continuing Education Institute.