On February 3, 2026, Professor Daniel Esparza and postdoctoral researcher Sergi Castellà take part in the second session of the Humanistic Dialogues at Pompeu Fabra University, in a conversation entitled “Reading, Eating, Drinking. Literature, Mysticism, Philosophy.”

We will soon publish the recording of the conversation.

Website of the Diàlegs Humanístics 2026

Description

We live in an age of insatiable hunger: everything is ingested, everything is consumed—territories, species, cultures, relationships—until nothing remains but residue. And yet philosophy has disparaged the mouth, considering it an organ “with very little taste” for knowledge, too closely bound to desire and necessity. But sapiens means “to taste”: to know with the body, to savor, to relish.

Perhaps we must learn to think from the mouth, not only in order to question what we consume, but also to discern that which cannot—and must not—be consumed. Literature, and especially mysticism, has always intuited this: that flavor can be knowledge, and that the material world is not an obstacle to truth, but its very condition.

This dialogue thus proposes an epistemology of taste: thinking from ingestion, from the place where remnants are left behind, from those things that cannot be fully assimilated. In a world consumed by consumption, perhaps only this kind of thinking—gustatory, embodied—can help us discern the boundary between what may be touched and what must be preserved, venerated, or forgiven.