“La mente diáfana is an erudite and readable journey through the complexity of this philosophy.”
——Publishers Weekly SP

“It is no overstatement to describe La fuga de dios as an integral amendment to the civilizing option that humanity made its own with Modernity. He is not the first author to attempt this, but he is certainly one of those who has achieved it in the most beautiful, persuasive and forceful way.”
——ACE Press

★Simplified Chinese translation rights sold.
★Winner of Valencian Critics’ Prize.
★Shortlisted National Essay Prize.
★An essay that will provide the joy that comes from the same source as knowledge.

Why a manual? Because it aims to be easy to handle and easy to understand, and its intention is fundamentally practical. Because it is not an official, academic or doctrinaire book, and it summarizes the most substantial of a few philosophical lives. Why portable? Because it is a tribute to walkers. Portable philosophy is an effort to free thought from the reclusion to which it has been subjected by scholastics and academics. A way to conjure that erudite mania of speaking only for those who share a chair or faculty.

This book proposes to travel the river of philosophy against the current, in search of its sources. The journey begins with the gesture of an anthropologist who, after studying philosophy in Paris, goes in search of truth among the savages. Then we visit the philosophers, contemplating unforgettable scenes: Wittgenstein takes notes in a trench, Nietzsche whispers to a horse, Kierkegaard finances an anticlerical pamphlet, Leibniz discovers love among princesses, Montaigne becomes encased, Plotinus hides his past, Socrates voluntarily drinks a poison and Empedocles throws himself into a volcano. What at first sight might seem strange had a profound meaning for all of them. Let’s call that meaning philosophy and see what happened.

Juan Arnau

Born in Valencia, in 1968, he is an astrophysicist and specialist in Eastern philosophies. His extensive work includes La fuga de dios, Historia de la imaginación and Manual de filosofía portátil (winner of the Premio de la Crítica Valenciana and finalist for the Premio Nacional de Ensayo). He has translated from Sanskrit the main works of Buddhism and Hinduism: Upanisad, Bhagavadgita, Abandono de la discusión and Fundamentos de la vía media, and written essays such as Antropología del budismo and Cosmologías de India. He is currently a professor at the Complutense University of Madrid, where he teaches classes on Indian thought. A defender of humanism in the face of the onslaught of the age of technological distraction, he is a regular contributor to the newspaper El País.

AWARDS & HONOURS
* Valencian Critics’ Prize 2014 for The Portable Philosophy Manual
* Shortlisted National Essay Prize 2014 for The Portable Philosophy Manual
* Shortlisted National Essay Prize 2021 for A Clear Mind