Rocio Orsi Portalo

Rocío Orsi Portalo was a Spanish philosopher, essayist, and translator, as well as a professor of philosophy at Charles III University of Madrid (UC3M). She is considered to be one of the most important Spanish-language thinkers of her generation. She studied philosophy at the Autonomous University of Madrid and received her Ph.D. from UC3M in 2006, with a thesis on thought and action in Sophocles. She was a research fellow and a professor at UC3M since 1999, and developed research and work stays in Paris, Cambridge, New York, and Bologna. She participated in numerous research projects and was a member of the Grupo Kóre de Estudios de Género. She was also active in civil society and was one of the first signatories of the manifesto Libres e Iguales. She cultivated the history of ideas, political and moral philosophy, epistemology, gender studies, and political economy. Her initial topics of interest were the relations between philosophy and literature and between epistemological and moral problems. She was later concerned with questions of the philosophy of history and planned a systematic study of ancient skepticism and its modern reception. She published several books and essays on these topics, such as El saber del error (The knowledge of error), Butterfield y la razón histórica (Butterfield and historical reason), and La economía a la intemperie (The economy in the open). She also edited several collective works, such as El desencanto como promesa (Disenchantment as a promise), Ritmos contemporáneos (Contemporary rhythms), and La guillotina del poder (The guillotine of power). She died of cancer in 2014 at the age of 38. Since 2016, UC3M has awarded the Rocío Orsi Prize to the best master's degree thesis in the Faculty of Humanities, Communication and Documentation.