Xavier Rubert de Ventós

Xavier Rubert de Ventós was a Catalan philosopher, writer and politician.

Scholarship

Rubert de Ventós obtained a degree in law in 1961 and a doctorate in philosophy from the University of Barcelona in 1965 with a thesis on aesthetics entitled La estética de la abstracción.
Rubert de Ventós served as a professor of aesthetics at the Polytechnic University of Catalonia as well as visiting professor at various American universities including Harvard, Berkeley and Cincinnati.
Rubert de Ventós created the Barcelona–New York Chair of Catalan Culture and Language and was a founding member of the New York Institute for Humanities and of the Institut d'Humanitats de Barcelona.

Rubert de Ventós was arrested three times for his activities as a member of the Workers' Front of Catalonia. In 1975 threats from Falangists forced him into exile in Paris, during which time he was expelled from the University of Barcelona for abandoning his position.
A childhood friend of Pasqual Maragall, Rubert de Ventós joined the Socialist Party of Catalonia and was a member of the Spanish parliament from 1982 to 1986 and of the European Parliament from 1986 to 1994.
Rubert de Ventós was also a member of the Commission for Dignity, an entity that calls for the return to their rightful owners of documents that were confiscated at the end of the Civil War and subsequently housed in the General Civil War Archive in Salamanca.
In November 2012, he signed a public manifesto in which he supported the centre-right Convergence and Union in the elections to the Parliament of Catalonia.