Joan Roura-Parella and his Presence in the United States

The philosopher Joan Roura-Parella, born in Tortellà (Catalonia) in 1897, was an active
member of the University of Barcelona Teaching Seminar, from which he obtained
his doctorate in 1937 with a thesis supervised by Joaquim Xirau. In 1939, he was
a member of the group that accompanied the poet Antonio Machado into exile. After
living for a period in Mexico (1939-1945), in 1946 he went to the United States to
lecture at Wesleyan University. Under the influence of Krausist philosophy and Quaker
spirituality, he explored the humanistic significance of culture, as a result of which his
teaching inspired by the cosmovisionary thinking of Eduard Spranger, with whom
he had contacts in Berlin between 1930 and 1932 took on an aesthetic dimension.
With this background, his philosophy of education points towards a vitalist aesthetic
formalism, so that education becomes a process akin to the neo-humanist Bildung
tradition in which an individual develops or gives form to himself throughout his
whole life. He died in 1983 in Middletown (Connecticut).