Maria Zambrano 1904 – 1991

Maria Zambrano Alarcon was a Spanish philosopher, essayist, and disciple of Jose Ortega y Gasset and one of the principal voices of twentieth-century Spanish-language thought. After the fall of the Spanish Republic she lived in a long exile through Mexico, Cuba, Puerto Rico, Switzerland, France, and Italy, and only in the last years of her life returned to a democratic Spain that received her with the Cervantes Prize in 1988. Her Philosophy and Poetry, Person and Democracy, and the late Clearings of the Forest developed a distinctive philosophy of poetic reason, of the irreducible person, and of the meditative, dawn-attentive form of philosophical writing.