Philosophy of the Americas, Misc

The purpose of this essay is to articulate a specific desideratum for any theory of Latinidad, namely, that there is no adequate conception of Latinx without an attendant conception of Afro-Latinx. In order to be reflective of those whom it purports to describe in the U.S. and elsewhere in the hemisphere, the term Latinx must be plastic enough to encompass the many internal differences, and even antagonisms, between its different constituent parts. Within it, we argue here in particular, it must (...) include its Afro-descended history, which includes not just African-descended people but also a denial of the influences of African-descended culture writ large. Our central claim here, then, is that a certain African-descendedness is constitutive of Latinidad in multiple registers, including history, cultural practices, and social identificatory processes despite Latinidad’s pernicious exclusionary history. (shrink)

Este trabajo reconstruye la trayectoria histórica y editorial de Signos Filosóficos, revista del Departamento de Filosofía de la Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana, Unidad Iztapalapa, publicada ininterrumpidamente desde 1999. Se examinan sus antecedentes, proceso de consolidación, políticas editoriales, incorporación a índices y bases de datos, así como su progresiva transición del formato impreso al entorno digital. El texto destaca el papel del trabajo colectivo, el apoyo institucional, la profesionalización de la gestión editorial y la participación del alumnado mediante el servicio social. Asimismo, (...) analiza los retos actuales vinculados con la actualización del Open Journal Systems, la interoperabilidad mediante ORCID y DOI, la publicación en XML y la regulación del uso de inteligencia artificial. En conjunto, la trayectoria de la revista muestra un proceso sostenido de adaptación tecnológica orientado a preservar la calidad académica, la transparencia editorial y el acceso abierto. (shrink)

America of Native Indians: Horizons of History, Voice, and Vision since 1492 is a volume that re-examines Native Indian history, culture, and literature from 1492 to the present. Moving beyond Eurocentric narratives, the book foregrounds Native voices, land-based knowledge systems, and the idea of survivance—resilience expressed through resistance, creativity, and continuity. Organised around themes of colonization, cultural re-framing, literary resurgence, and contemporary ecological and social challenges, the volume highlights Native art, performance, literature, and environmental thought as powerful forms of cultural (...) and intellectual sovereignty. With its broad scope and ethical emphasis, the book makes an essential contribution to Indigenous and comparative studies and is accessible to scholars, students, and general readers alike. (shrink)

This essay examines Josiah Royce’s social philosophy by tracing the sources of his philosophy of loyalty to some understudied contemporaneous literatures. Of particular interest is the manner in which Royce drew his theses about a wise provincialism from the Anglo-Saxonist school of historiography at Hopkins and Harvard. This historical background, together with my analysis of some popular literatures on race questions, frames Royce’s views on colonialism in terms of a few psychological theses. Royce was concerned, namely, to articulate a view (...) of American subjectivity that was at once imperial and non-violent: Anglo-Americans should convert our colonial subjects to the American culture, language, and polity without resort to mob violence. The result is a theory that foreshadows, in a few key respects, the political philosophy of the modern movement to “make America great.” Royce nonetheless differed from his ideological descendants in that he interpreted lynching and other violent tendencies as reversions to savagery, and he sought instead an imperial psychology based rather in more peaceful local mythologies. (shrink)

This philosophical conversation was the 2025 Coss Dialogue at the 52nd Annual Meeting of the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy at Howard University in Washington, DC. It explores how insurrection, liberation, and joy intertwine in everyday struggles for racial and economic justice. Drawing on decades of community organizing experience in Washington, DC, Moulden describes how philosophy, popular education, storytelling, and community-led power building enable Black people and other oppressed persons to claim their rights to housing, work, and place. (...) He emphasizes consciousness-raising and community-building as philosophical and practical outcomes of organizing, even when material victories appear partial, temporary, or seemingly nonexistent. The dialogue highlights initiatives and organizations like ONE DC, the Black Workers & Wellness Center, and cooperative ownership models that challenge racialized capitalism and displacement through participatory democracy and the incubation of economic alternatives. (shrink)

Texto apresentado no XX Encontro da Associação Nacional de Pós-Graduação em Filosofia (ANPOF), ocorrido em Recife, Pernambuco, entre 30 de setembro e 4 de outubro de 2024.

This is a tribute to John Cobb Jr. who passed away on the 26th December, 2025.

A presente tese de doutorado em Direito propõe uma reflexão sobre como a Modernidade significou a imposição ao chamado Sul Global do Ocidentalismo, do Estado, do Direito "oficial" e do ordenamento institucional, desconsiderando toda a jurisdição pré-existente dos povos originários. Em um primeiro momento, a pesquisa busca traçar os pilares da civilização ocidental que foram moldados na Antiguidade e na Idade Média, quais sejam, a Filosofia Grega, o Direito Romano e a ética judaico-cristã. A seguir, partindo do pressuposto de que (...) o início da Modernidade se deu com o "descobrimento" da América em 1492, o estudo pretende mostrar como aqueles pilares foram importados e porque eles não se comunicam com a História e com as demandas das ex-colônias latino-americanas, afinal seus ordenamentos jurídicos foram pautados pelo Iluminismo liberal burguês europeu. Então, o trabalho busca oferecer no campo filosófico um desmonte das estruturas jurídicas institucionais vigentes no Brasil sob uma perspectiva decolonial. Neste momento é proposto um Constitucionalismo Decolonial Brasileiro, pautado na interculturalidade, no pluralismo identitário e jurídico, no reconhecimento da natureza como sujeito de direitos, na jurisdição indígena e na participação popular. O método de pesquisa utilizado nesta tese foi o qualitativo, por meio da consulta a livros e artigos científicos nas searas do Direito, da Filosofia, da Sociologia, da Antropologia, da Ciência Política e da História. Tal abordagem interdisciplinar procura analisar a composição do sistema jurídico brasileiro a partir de uma perspectiva que reconhece sistemáticas experiências de vulnerabilidade, de racismo e de marginalização. Os resultados da pesquisa indicam que a adoção do Constitucionalismo Decolonial Brasileiro poderia corrigir distorções estruturais, proporcionando respostas mais eficazes às demandas sociais contemporâneas, especialmente no que se refere ao reconhecimento e valorização das culturas indígenas e tradicionais. Mais do que uma mudança normativa, referido rearranjo constitucional causaria impactos profundos nas práticas institucionais e em todo o comportamento social. -/- This doctoral thesis in Law proposes a reflection on how Modernity represented the imposition of Westernism, the State, the "official" Law and the institutional order on the so-called Global South, disregarding the pre-existing juridical systems of Indigenous peoples. At first, the research traces the pillars of Western civilization formed in Antiquity and the Middle Ages, namely Greek Philosophy, Roman Law and Judeo-Christian ethics. Next, assuming that Modernity began with the "discovery" of America in 1492, the study aims to show how those pillars were imported and why they fail to engage with the History and demands of the Latin American former colonies, since their legal systems were shaped by the European bourgeois liberal Enlightenment. Therefore, the work aims to offer, from a philosophical standpoint, a critique and deconstruction of Brazil‘s current institutional legal structures from a decolonial perspective. At this stage, a Brazilian Decolonial Constitutionalism is proposed, grounded in interculturality, identity and legal pluralism, the recognition of nature as a subject of rights, Indigenous jurisdiction and popular participation. The research adopts a qualitative methodology, drawing upon books and academic articles in the fields of Law, Philosophy, Sociology, Anthropology, Political Science and History. This interdisciplinary approach seeks to analyze the formation of the Brazilian legal system from a perspective that recognizes systemic experiences of vulnerability, racism and marginalization. The findings suggest that adopting a Brazilian Decolonial Constitutionalism could address structural distortions, providing more effective responses to contemporary social demands, especially in terms of recognizing and valuing Indigenous and traditional cultures. More than a normative change, such a constitutional transformation could profoundly impact institutional practices and social behavior as a whole. (shrink)

Tribal Colleges and Universities (TCUs) have a unique position in the landscape of higher education vis-à-vis trauma-informed pedagogy insofar as nearly all of their students identify with a cultural group that has experienced genocide, that continues to experience discrimination and poverty, and whose families are inevitably affected by serious psychological problems that plausibly might be considered as responses to trauma. In this paper, we principally concern ourselves with the healing role that TCUs are playing in the quest to repair the (...) historical damage that has been done and also that continues to be done. Accordingly, we detail the important work they do. But, in doing so, we also closely examine the Indigenous historical trauma theoretical framework, which figures prominently in the thinking of many TCU staff, and suggest that a resiliency focus can helpfully assist with resolving a number of theoretical difficulties. We then move to assess the practical dimensions of healing and resilience in the Tribal College as staff members tackle the myriad challenges facing not only their students, but Tribal Nations more generally in the 21st century and beyond. (shrink)

El artículo critica la obra _Descolonizar la dialéctica_ de George Ciccarello-Maher, quien propone “decolonizar” la dialéctica hegeliano-marxiana para liberarla de supuestos eurocéntricos, teleológicos y deterministas. Maher apuesta, en cambio, por una dialéctica radicalizada, centrada en la contingencia, la indeterminación y el antagonismo irreconciliable. Nuestro texto cuestiona esta interpretación, señalando que Maher tergiversa tanto a Hegel como a Marx. La dialéctica de Hegel distingue claramente entre mecanismo (determinismo externo) y teleología (autodeterminación consciente), al punto de plantear una antinomia entre ambas formas (...) de objetividad. Por lo demás, esta teleología no implica la imposición de un plan externo, sino una finalidad inmanente ligada a la acción humana. Por otro lado, en Marx, el determinismo no es mecánico, sino que opera con base en tendencias estadísticas (ejemplo: la caída tendencial de la tasa de ganancia), sin negar la agencia política. Rebatimos también la acusación de que la dialéctica inhiba la lucha política: si, en Hegel, la teleología autoconsciente es la antinomia del determinismo mecánico, en Marx, el antagonismo de clases tiene una base objetiva, aunque su resolución no sea automática. La crítica de Maher al eurocentrismo hegeliano-marxista es válida, pero su propuesta de una dialéctica “inconmensurable” y “sin certezas” resulta teóricamente vaga y políticamente trivial. En conclusión, rechazamos la tesis de que la dialéctica pueda “decolonizarse”. La obra de Maher, pese a su intención emancipadora, termina por diluir el potencial crítico de la dialéctica, porque ignora por completo su fundamento conceptual. (shrink)

Frankfurt School methodology involves a lasting commitment to immanent critique. What distinguishes immanent critique from other forms of social criticism, scholars in this tradition argue, is that social practices are to be judged according to norms and potentials already contained within their objects. This article considers critical theory's relationship to coloniality by developing a three‐part challenge to the practice of immanent critique, drawing on insights of decolonial philosophers Anibal Quijano, Enrique Dussel, Maria Lugones, and Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí. Immanent critics, I conclude, (...) risk being inattentive to constitutive exclusions, reinscribing asymmetrical burdens on certain critics, and unwittingly replaying a mechanism of domination familiar from colonialism in and through their preferred method of critique. Accordingly, I argue that immanent critics should attend to relations of power that govern the practice of critique itself and offer reasons for being more pluralistic about our methods of criticism. (shrink)

In this scholarly and thought-provoking book, Terrance MacMullan makes an important contribution to the broader task of “bridging the rift separating the philosophical conversations of predominantly English-speaking North America and predominantly Spanish and South or Latin America” (viii). The chronological and geographical scope of MacMullan’s book is one of its most impressive features, so let me alphabetically name just a few of the philosophers he engages in English and Spanish as North-South pairs to give a sense of the book’s tremendous (...) range: Addams and Alberdi, Anzaldúa and Bolívar, DuBois and Frondizi, Emerson and Ingenieros, James and Martí, Peirce and Rodó, Royce and Vasconcelos. This list leaves out a lot, including all the living philosophers writing in both Spanish and English that MacMullan engages and cites throughout, but even this heavily truncated list gestures toward MacMullan’s success in fostering “a genuine, integrated inter-American philosophy capable of deconstructing the legacy of the United Sates’ white supremacist empire in the Americas and to envision a greater America—[…] una América Cósmica—that achieves the promise of our ideals by being fully democratic, engaged, and pluralistic” (xv). (shrink)

This article offers an approach to baroque forms as a mediation to question and reflect on the perspective of the vanquished in Latin American history. To achieve this, it explores the relationship between the colonial experience and the current crises in the region, highlighting the importance of authors such as Bolívar Echeverría, Bonfil Batalla, Serge Gruzinski, José Luis Romero, Pablo Casanova, and Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui in the understanding of the social history of the Colony. It also analyzes the emergence of (...) a social life marked by miscegenation, cultural disputes, and the coexistence of disputed cultural codes appropriated by baroque forms. In addition, it examines the aesthetic-political strategies of the Baroque era as possible concrete historical references that allow us to imagine other critical models and aesthetic forms of intervention to prefigure new possibilities of the real in the present. This approach offers a novel perspective for understanding the inherent civilizational crisis of colonial sociality and its implications for contemporary society. (shrink)

In this conversation, Anne Anlin Cheng and Shivani Radhakrishnan address questions of writing across genre, the burdens of representation for Asian Americans, and the ties between intimate experiences of loss and larger social histories of racialized gender. This discussion draws from lived experience, psychoanalytic theory, histories of art and architecture, and scholarship on race.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: American Pragmatism: An Introduction by Albert R. Spencer. Polity Press, 2020. Reviewed by: Lee A. McBride III -/- American Pragmatism: An Introduction is a judicious and stimulating read, comprising an introduction and five numbered chapters. The introduction orients the book, offering various ways of conceiving American Philosophy and American pragmatism. Spencer explains that it is difficult to discern the national and cultural variables that make a philosophy an (...) American philosophy. Not all philosophers who practice philosophy in the United States claim the descriptor "American Philosophy." And, within the group that embraces the descriptor, some take American pragmatism to be, in essence, a theory of truth (or a method by which we can make our ideas clear); others take pragmatism to be a method of experience, a pluralistic approach to knowledge creation and social amelioration (2). It is a complicated picture, and Spencer affords ample care and attention to the disparate camps of pragmatism. Chapter 1: "Fallibilism and the Classical Pragmatists" is largely devoted to Charles S. Peirce and William James. Peirce and James, as fallibilists, are contrasted against Descartes and Hume, respectively. Peirce and James diverge in regard to style and their commitments to (scholastic) realism. Spencer discusses Josiah Royce briefly at the closing of the chapter, noting how Royce's work can serve as a foil for both Peircean and Jamesian pragmatisms. Chapter 2: "Meliorism and the Chicago Pragmatists" highlights the pragmatist philosophical contributions of Jane Addams and John Dewey. In this chapter, Spencer emphasizes sympathetic knowledge, cooperative intelligence, the pattern of experimental inquiry, and social amelioration. Spencer deserves kudos for introducing Addams's pragmatist contributions first, then explaining the ways in which her work in community-building and social amelioration influenced Dewey. Chapter 3: "Pluralism and the Harvard Pragmatists" highlights the work of a motley crew: George Santayana, W. E. B. Du Bois, Horace Kallen, and Alain Locke. This chapter draws attention to the pluralism one can detect in Santayana's detached cosmopolitanism, Du Bois's double consciousness, Kallen's cultural pluralism, and Locke's democratic pluralism. We are introduced to a Spaniard, two African American men, and a Jewish man, all of whom had spent time abroad. Each offers a critical perspective that falls outside the conventional view of the purported democratic culture of the United States. Chapter 4: "Verification and the Analytic Pragmatists" turns to the philosophers of the logico-linguistic turn, [End Page 108] featuring C. I. Lewis, W. V. O. Quine, and Richard Rorty. Here, we see a pronouncedly analytic approach to the analysis of propositions, inference, and semantic content—a heightened attention to shoring up defensible conceptions of truth and the real. The goal is to articulate a coherent conceptual pragmatic position that evades both scientistic reductionism and Fregean transcendental presuppositions, all the while offering a feasible conception of truth. Chapter 5: "Hope and the Contemporary Pragmatists" surveys how pragmatists have engaged with various traditions in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries to potentially bolster their positions and find hope. Spencer highlights three promising strands. The first strand is that of Jürgen Habermas. Habermas arose out of Frankfurt School critical theory but appropriated pragmatist insights from Peirce, Dewey, and Mead to formulate his conceptions of communicative action and communitive rationality (208). Habermas reconstructed the reductive dialectical materialism of the Frankfurt School, developing a sophisticated theory of democracy as public discourse. Spencer asserts that "ultimately Habermas is the best demonstration of pragmatism's potential when compared with critical theory during the Cold War" (208). Spencer also finds the work of Huw Price promising. Price, in an effort to defuse the tension between neopragmatism's antirealism and scientific realism, offers a tenable theory of truth: truth as a (postulated) practical norm, or "truth as a convenient fiction" (217). Truth, as a practical norm, gives normative structure and impetus to various forms of inquiry. And, to close this chapter on hope and contemporary pragmatism, Spencer delineates a third promising strand. He writes that "perhaps the most promising development among pragmatists results from their increasing engagement with American Indian philosophy and other philosophical traditions throughout the Americas" (219). American pragmatists, following Scott L. Pratt and Bruce Wilshire, are increasingly recognizing... (shrink)

Reseña del libro "José Vasconcelos: Ideario de acción. Discursos, artículos, cartas, documentos 1920-1924". Selección e introducción de Raúl Trejo Villalobos, Cámara de Diputados, México, 2022.

Reseña del libro "José Vasconcelos. Ideario de acción: Discursos, artículos, cartas, documentos 1920-1924." Review of this book of a Mexican Philosopher.

Lucius Outlaw and Shannon Sullivan have argued for the preservation of racial distinctiveness and the necessity of racial separatism. This paper articulates and challenges this push for racial separatism and the particular conception of race evoked therein. The author points out that the multiplicity, the multiculturalism, the intersectionality within these communities of resistance is typically belittled, fragmented, or erased. Recognizing the practical use of racial coalitions to combat racism, the author articulates an alternative conception of coalitional agency, one that allows (...) for multiplicitous identities, opening avenues to intercultural communication and impure coalitions of resistance. (shrink)

Walking away is both refusal and production (Tuck & Yang, 2014), a seeming paradox taken up in work on fugitivity and marronage (Diouf, 2021; Grant, Woodson, & Dumas, 2021; Harney & Moten, 2013; Hartman, 2007), survivance (Powell, 2002; Sabzalian, 2019; Vizenor, 2008), testimonios (Calderon-Berumen, 2021; Delgado Bernal, Burciaga, & Flores Carmona, 2012; Latina Feminist Group, 2001), and other forms of critical pedagogy and curriculum. In other words, walking away presumes both the rejection of a form of status quo (walking away (...) from something) and a new direction taken (a walking toward something else). In the context of education, many teachers and researchers have reached that breaking point where/when no more curricular/pedagogic violence can be survived, and it is in that moment that those researchers and teachers actively remove themselves from those systems and assert new courses with new possibilities. -/- This edited volume is a collection of works chronicling acts of refusal that manifest as walking away. In some cases what is walked away from is the erasure of experience in curriculum while in others it is a fundamentalist religious experience. In still other cases what is walked away from is the carceral nature of school discipline policies. In each case walking away is resistance, refusal, and re/co-producing new possibilities and agencies. What is walked toward is a new curriculum/pedagogy of resistance sometimes within and sometimes without that place. -/- The main themes addressed in this volume are those of active refusal of forms of fundamentalist dogmatism. These include the physical act of walking away, the removal of oneself and one’s students from a particular school environment, the refusal to teach a formal curriculum that dehumanizes, and the active production of new curriculum that directly resists normative discourses of violence and erasure. Works included in this volume think with a variety of literatures and frameworks including survivance, Black studies, Latine studies, posthuman agencies, multiple forms of feminism, critical theory, and/or a combination of these. (shrink)

We generally assume that the encounter with the Americas contributed to the downfall of trust in the ancient authorities. Not only did the ancients have no specific knowledge of the existence of the so-called “New World,” but the knowledge they did possess proved, in some cases, to be contradictory to the new discoveries. One of the main fields in which experience of the New World was used to criticise ancient knowledge was meteorology, and in particular the fact that the torrid (...) zone was not extremely hot and dry as the ancients had claimed, but of a pleasant climate with abundant vegetation. This paper investigates how Juan de Cárdenas (1563–1609) made use of his experience in the New World to support the truth of Aristotle's theories in the field of meteorology. More precisely, Cárdenas employed the hypothesis of subterranean caves to account for the humidity and pleasant climate of the West Indies in the tropics. In this way, he claimed that this new land was exceptional, while he sought to preserve Aristotle's theory that the torrid zone, in normal conditions, is indeed dry and hot. Cárdenas aimed to prove that the peculiarities of the New World can only be explained by his hypothesis, and he used a comparison between Spanish and American vegetation to show why the former is the result of a perfect nature, while the latter is inferior due to its location on top of these caves, which do not allow nature to follow its own course, which in this case would be complete dryness and lack of vegetation. (shrink)

Can a person from Latin America be a Catholic, or a feminist, or a democratic socialist in an authentic way? These identities come from Europe, and given the colonial history of Latin America, it seems reasonable to think that decolonizing the Latin American mind is a condition for its authenticity. Further, it seems reasonable to think that decolonization itself requires extirpating ideas and identities originating from the colonizers, especially those used to establish the colonial order. Thus, it seems that Latin (...) Americans cannot adopt such identities; authentic decolonization demands otherwise. In this paper I argue that the thought of twentieth century Mexican philosopher Jorge Portilla provides a persuasive account of the nature of authentic self-creation that allows for a kind of decolonization that makes it conceptually possible for Latin Americans to be Catholics, feminists, or democratic socialists in an authentic fashion. That is, authentic decolonization of the mind, I argue, need not involve a blanket rejection of identities originating from the colonizers; instead, it can be understood as a particular kind of authentic self-creation: one that is appropriately sensitive to the colonial history of the identities freely chosen by the agent. (shrink)

En el presente artículo se reflexiona sobre dos propuestas de Arturo Andrés Roig: la conciencia de la alteridad y el a priori antropológico para reconocer sus posibilidades de cara al progreso de la ideas y programas filosóficos. Para ello, se muestran las insuficiencias y posibilidades. Las primeras emergen al adoptar uno de los principios más importantes que sostienen el programa filosófico de la modernidad: el mantenimiento del ser humano como fundamento del mundo. Las posibilidades de sus aportes cobran fuerza a (...) la luz de las nuevas propuestas filosóficas que pretenden superar los postulados de la modernidad. (shrink)

The field of Latin American philosophy has established itself as a relevant subfield of philosophical inquiry. However, there might be good reasons to consider that our focus on the subfield could have distracted us from considering another subfield that, although it might share some geographical proximity, does not share the same historical basic elements. In this paper, I argue for a possible and meaningful conceptual difference between Latin American Philosophy and Indigenous philosophy produced in Latin America. First, I raise what (...) I call Mariátegui’s Solidarity Challenge to show that there might be some neglectful treatment of the philosophical views of different Indigenous groups. I then depart from Mariátegui and engage in a critical exercise to show that even he would be guilty of failing in his own solidarity demands. I follow that by drawing out some implications of the argument. I first sketch how this differentiation would play out against the political project of “Mestizaje,” a project that seems to inform some of the Latin American philosophical tradition. I then speculate about the kinds of duties that the field of Latin American philosophy might have towards the field of Indigenous Philosophy produced in Latin America. (shrink)

This essay fills in some historical, conceptual, and pedagogical gaps that appear in the most visible and recent professional efforts to “revive” Philosophy as a Way of Life (PWOL). I present “American Philosophy and Self-Culture” as an advanced undergraduate seminar that broadens who counts in and what counts as philosophy by immersing us in the lives, writings, and practices of seven representative U.S.-American philosophers of self-culture, community-building, and world-changing: Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790), Frederick Douglass (1818–1895), William Ellery Channing (1780–1842), Henry David (...) Thoreau (1817–1862), Margaret Fuller (1810-1850), Henry Bugbee (1915–1999), and Gloria Anzaldúa (1942–2004). Students enter the class with preconceptions about who philosophers are, what they do, how they write, and the languages in which they write. Students walk out with new senses of self, place, and language that emerge through new ways of seeing, doing, and writing philosophy. (shrink)

Racism in the USA not only takes place in law, economics, politics, mass media and new media, education, literature, and popular culture but also occurs in philosophy. An abundance of Latino philosophers, African-American philosophers, and Native American philosophers are excluded from the American philosophy canon. To discover whether racism happens in the field of American philosophy, the writer surveys 15 American philosophy books written between the 1940s and the 2020s by various American writers, the whites and the non-whites. The writer (...) carries out an ‗index-study‘: scanning philosopher names in the index of each book, identifying and scrutinizing the names, listing and categorizing them into race categories, counting them, comparing the number of non-white philosophers and white philosophers mentioned in each book, putting them in a table, and interpreting why there is a disparity between the number of non-white and white philosophers included in the books. The survey result shows that racism happens in American philosophy; the writers of the 15 American philosophy books exclude an abundance of non-white philosophers. There is a critical need to write a new, post-national American philosophy book that does justice to non-white philosophers in the near future so that racism diminishes. (shrink)

This article synthesizes the results of several interviews with argumentation scholars from across the American continents to address three questions regarding the connections in argumentation studies between North and South/Central America: “What motivated the study of argumentation in the Americas?” “What commonalities, if any, exist in argumentation studies across the Americas?” and “What should the future of argumentation studies in the Americas look like?” Using these interviews in combination with existing textual sources, the article also provides motivated suggestions for directions (...) for the future of the community in the field. (shrink)

It is widely believed that philosophical pessimism is committed to fatalism about the sufferings that characterize the human condition, and that it encourages resignation and withdrawal from the political realm in response. This paper offers an explanation for and argument against this perception by distinguishing two functions that pessimism can serve. Pessimism’s skeptical mode suggests that fundamental cross-cultural constraints on the human condition bar us from the good life (however defined). These constraints are often represented as immune to political amelioration, (...) leading to the perception that pessimism is intrinsically fatalistic and resigned. Yet pessimism’s critical function emphasizes the political, economic, and cultural contingency of many sources of suffering and crisis while exhorting us to reject and reimagine the social forces that actively harm our capacity to flourish. It also offers an internal critique of skeptical pessimism’s tendency to naturalize and depoliticize the sources of our sufferings. These sometimes contradictory skeptical and critical tendencies should both be grouped under the pessimist banner, and we should see pessimism’s critical mode as especially valuable to political critique. -/- . (shrink)

Our paper examines Gloria Anzaldúa’s critical appropriation of Mexican philosophical sources, especially in the writing of Borderlands/La Frontera. We demonstrate how Anzaldúa developed a transnational Philosophy of Mexicanness, effectively contributing to what has been recently characterized as the “multi-generational project to pursue philosophy from and about Mexican circumstances” (Vargas). More specifically, we recover “La Mexicana en la Chicana” by paying careful attention to Anzaldúa’s Mexican sources, both those she explicitly cites and those we have discovered while conducting archival research using (...) the Gloria Evangelina Anzaldúa Papers from the Benson Latin American Collection at the University of Texas at Austin. The three sections of our paper: 1) define the terms Mexican and philosophy in conversation with Anzaldúa’s work, 2) examine the Mexican philosophical sources that Anzaldúa cites in Borderlands/La Frontera, and 3) present the other major Mexican philosophical influences on Anzaldúa that we have found in her archive. The eight Mexican philosophical sources we discuss here include: José Vasconcelos (1882-1959), Miguel León-Portilla (1926-2019), Juana Armanda Alegría (1938- ), Octavio Paz (1914-1998), Samuel Ramos (1897-1959), Rosario Castellanos (1925-1974), Sor Juana Inés de La Cruz (1648-1695), and Jorge Carrión (1913-2005). (shrink)

This original, contemporary synthesis between phenomenology and Marx’s late work begins from Edmund Husserl’s The Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology to chart a new program for Socratic phenomenology in the current confrontation between planetary technology and place-based Indigeneity.

Desarrollar el recuento de la producción filosófica contemporánea no es una tarea sencilla. Más en nuestro país, donde se hacen pocos esfuerzos para comprender la dimensión real del pensamiento mexicano. Ello se debe a varios factores, entre los que pueden señalarse la apatía por conocer las reflexiones alrededor de temas nacionales, el poco interés que despiertan pensadores locales, la casi nula difusión que tienen algunas propuestas filosóficas y los esfuerzos aislados por componer una historia de la “filosofía de provincia”. En (...) la mayoría de los estados de la república, no existe una tradición sólida para publicar y debatir sistemáticamente la filosofía; tan lamentable carencia deviene con regularidad en la alimentación de una filosofía ficticia o en aislamiento de meditaciones originales y novedosas que no tienen la difusión que merecen. Para comprender parte de las causas de este problema, se propone, como experimento historiográfico, hacer una revisión de cuatro tesis vinculadas con la filosofía presentadas en el estado de Chihuahua entre 1968 y 1993; se incluye también la de José Fuentes Mares, defendida en la unam en 1944. Se parte del supuesto que en trabajos de esta naturaleza puede verse con cierta claridad la vocación, talento y disposición filosófica de los autores. Dado que no participa un comité editorial o un corrector de estilo, más allá de la guía del director de tesis, es poco el mejoramiento metodológico y estilístico que reciben las tesis, con lo que se evidencian carencias y fortalezas de los sustentantes. Se revisará tan sólo una muestra; sin embargo, estos trabajos son clave porque dos de ellos son de filósofos con reconocimiento nacional (Fuentes Mares y Rico Bovio), una es la primera tesis de la extinta maestría en Filosofía de la Universidad Autónoma de Ciudad Juárez (David Mariscal). Dos más fueron escritas por profesores que no se han dedicado a la investigación filosófica (Gilberto Vargas y Rubén Lau), y otras dos fueron escritas por exrectores de universidades chihuahuenses (Rubén Lau y Fuentes Mares). Los temas tocados (filosofía del derecho, antropología filosófica, filosofía griega e historia de la filosofía mexicana) brindan una panorámica de intereses y líneas de investigación –si así pudiera llamárseles– a los que se asoman los tesistas chihuahuenses. De esta manera, se está en condiciones de esbozar un “mapa intelectual” superficial en el que también podrán visualizarse ciertas tendencias en la docencia dentro del estado. Palabras clave: historiografía de la filosofía, filosofía mexicana, filosofía contemporánea del norte de México. (shrink)

Desarrollar el recuento de la producción filosófica contemporánea no es una tarea sencilla. Más en nuestro país, donde se hacen pocos esfuerzos para comprender la dimensión real del pensamiento mexicano. Ello se debe a varios factores, entre los que pueden señalarse la apatía por conocer las reflexiones alrededor de temas nacionales, el poco interés que despiertan pensadores locales, la casi nula difusión que tienen algunas propuestas filosóficas y los esfuerzos aislados por componer una historia de la “filosofía de provincia”. En (...) la mayoría de los estados de la república, no existe una tradición sólida para publicar y debatir sistemáticamente la filosofía; tan lamentable carencia deviene con regularidad en la alimentación de una filosofía ficticia o en aislamiento de meditaciones originales y novedosas que no tienen la difusión que merecen. Para comprender parte de las causas de este problema, se propone, como experimento historiográfico, hacer una revisión de cuatro tesis vinculadas con la filosofía presentadas en el estado de Chihuahua entre 1968 y 1993; se incluye también la de José Fuentes Mares, defendida en la unam en 1944. Se parte del supuesto que en trabajos de esta naturaleza puede verse con cierta claridad la vocación, talento y disposición filosófica de los autores. Dado que no participa un comité editorial o un corrector de estilo, más allá de la guía del director de tesis, es poco el mejoramiento metodológico y estilístico que reciben las tesis, con lo que se evidencian carencias y fortalezas de los sustentantes. Se revisará tan sólo una muestra; sin embargo, estos trabajos son clave porque dos de ellos son de filósofos con reconocimiento nacional (Fuentes Mares y Rico Bovio), una es la primera tesis de la extinta maestría en Filosofía de la Universidad Autónoma de Ciudad Juárez (David Mariscal). Dos más fueron escritas por profesores que no se han dedicado a la investigación filosófica (Gilberto Vargas y Rubén Lau), y otras dos fueron escritas por exrectores de universidades chihuahuenses (Rubén Lau y Fuentes Mares). Los temas tocados (filosofía del derecho, antropología filosófica, filosofía griega e historia de la filosofía mexicana) brindan una panorámica de intereses y líneas de investigación –si así pudiera llamárseles– a los que se asoman los tesistas chihuahuenses. De esta manera, se está en condiciones de esbozar un “mapa intelectual” superficial en el que también podrán visualizarse ciertas tendencias en la docencia dentro del estado. Palabras clave: historiografía de la filosofía, filosofía mexicana, filosofía contemporánea del norte de México. (shrink)

This article describes my ongoing attempts to more successfully engage the full linguistic repertoires and cultural identities of undergraduate students at a “Hispanic Serving Institution” (HSI) in South Texas by teaching a bilingual Introduction to Latin American Philosophy course in the “Language, Philosophy, and Culture” area of Texas’ General Education Core Curriculum. By uncovering the diverse identities, worldviews, and languages of those who were historically excluded from the Eurocentric discipline of philosophy through the conquest and colonization of the Americas, Latin (...) American philosophers offer us new ways of thinking and living by challenging Anglocentric language, philosophy, and culture. As part of the new B3 (Bilingual, Bicultural, and Biliterate) vision of the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, the course is designed to draw upon the richly varied bilingualisms and biliteracies of predominantly Latinx students in order to help them honor, theorize, and cultivate their bicultural identities by “philosophizing in tongues” rather than being forced to assimilate to the monolingual and monocultural ideology that prevails across both mainstream Anglophone philosophy and the system of higher education in the United States of America. (shrink)

This book provides a historical and theoretical analysis of the Ayotzinapa social movement from the perspective of Latin American philosophy. The author addresses questions such as how a social movement is born, how (and if) the distinct social movement organizations should be defined, and what (if any) should be the extent of these organizations.

El artículo consta de cuatro partes. En la primera parte, la introducción, señalo algunos aspectos de la importancia del proyecto. Segundo, describo y evalúo como Varela interpreta la filosofía. Tercero, exploro su eclecticismo dentro de su filosofía. Por último, explico el concepto de utilidad en el quehacer filosófico de Varela. Estos tres conceptos: filosofía, eclecticismo y utilidad están correlacionados en su obra. La filosofía con la recta razón. El eclecticismo, o lo que Varela llama la “verdadera filosofía,” con la sabia (...) selección de argumentos, incluyendo diversos métodos para explorar nuestras experiencias cotidianas, y la utilidad con la mesurada evaluación de nuestra conducta, incluyendo el bien común. Dado que estos tres conceptos son polisémicos, ellos pueden ser manipulados, y de hecho han sido tergiversados, por pensadores que han tratado de explicar el pensamiento filosófico vareliano con fines partidistas, ya sea con buenas intenciones o con fines ideológicos tendenciosos. (shrink)

This essay examines Gloria Anzaldúa’s critical appropriation of two Mexican philosophers in the writing of Borderlands/La Frontera: Samuel Ramos and Octavio Paz. We argue that although neither of these authors is cited in her seminal work, Anzaldúa had them both in mind through the writing process and that their ideas are present in the text itself. Through a genealogical reading of Borderlands/La Frontera, and aided by archival research, we demonstrate how Anzaldúa’s philosophical vision of the “new mestiza” is a critical (...) continuation of the broader tradition known as la filosofía de lo mexicano, which flourished during a golden age of Mexican philosophy (1910–1960). Our aim is to open new directions in Latinx and Latin American philosophy by presenting Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera as a profound scholarly encounter with two classic works of Mexican philosophy, Ramos’ Profile of Man and Culture in Mexico and Paz’s The Labyrinth of Solitude. (shrink)

Drawing primarily from the cultural traditions and beliefs of the Muscogee peoples, I will provide an account of how harmony can play a foundational role in providing a structure to morality. In the process of providing this account, I will begin (§2) by defining two key Muscogee concepts: ‘energy’ (§2.1) and ‘harmony’ (§2.2). I will also explain how the relationship between these two concepts can provide a structure for morality. Then I will explain the conditions that make promoting harmony a (...) normative principle (§3) by explaining why promoting harmony is relevant to humans (§3.1) as well as a providing a prudential reason to promote harmony (§3.2). Finally, I will explain how harmony can be achieved (§4) by explaining two examples that highlight the importance of non-moral knowledge in promoting harmony. I will then conclude with some remarks about how the Muscogee concept of harmony relates to some contemporary metaethical concerns (§5). (shrink)

This article offers a critical complement to Diego von Vacano’s differential characterization of Bolívar’s political thought and his understanding of race through a comparative analysis between Bolívar’s views and those of certain philosophers of the Enlightenment. Indeed, von Vacano argues that Bolívar’s contributions to republican theory have been traditionally ignored by the Anglo-American tradition. Though von Vacano is right in underscoring that Bolívar’s political thought deserves more attention since it contains valuable contributions that stand in “contradistinction to prevalent discourses in (...) European and American intellectual history,” this article argues that, if we reconstruct the genealogy of Bolívar’s political thought by tracing it back to Montesquieu and Rousseau, it turns out to be very different in some respects from the views voiced in European discourses, but it also bears the imprint of certain racist assumptions and biases. This article also offers a brief diagnosis of the tensions that are found in Bolívar's political thought. (shrink)

I propose to take a more proximate and micro-contextual approach to the history of cultural psychology, by focusing on the 1960s. In this historical snapshot, Jerome Bruner emerges as a consummate experimental scientist, organizer of scientific knowledge, and entrepreneur in education. Looking ahead, his work continued to evolve: from perceptual readiness and values in perception (1950s) to thinking and educational psychology (1960s). Then came developmental psychology and spiral curriculum (1970s), language as social interaction (1980s), the narrative turn to meaning (1990s), (...) and legal psychology (2000s). His scientific biography resembles a prism, refracting myriad persons and cultures in which he moved. Within that context it is possible to trace several pathways to cultural psychology. (shrink)

Estudio sobre el contexto filosófico de la Escuela de Madrid, y sus inicios, a colación de la figura de Juan Rof Carballo.

Common notions of comparative philosophy tend to be strongly configured by the East-West axis. This essay suggests ways of seeing Latin American liberation philosophy as a form of comparative philosophy and an important Latin American thinker as being relevant for East-West political philosophy. The essay focuses on the Peruvian activist and intellectual, José Mariátegui, who is widely regarded to have been a leading Marxist, liberatory, and decolonial figure in 20th century Latin America. Like many “Third World” intellectuals of the interwar (...) years, Mariátegui had an interest in decolonization struggles in Asia and wrote with some consistency on this subject and in ways that bear significantly upon key themes in his political theory. Since very little of this has received commentary, this essay begins a discussion of Mariátegui's decolonial experimentation with ideas about Asia, decolonization, and indigenous cultural forms, like those of the Incas and Confucians. After some preliminary discussion of Euro.. (shrink)

Peter Knox-Shaw, “The Dry Salvages: T. S. Eliot in Wordsworthian Waters” -/- Since Wordsworth was seen by T. S. Eliot both as a fellow revolutionary and as a cultural adversary, he supplies a particularly rich illustration of Eliot’s contention that the significance of a poem depends on an appreciation of its relation to the great poetry of the past. The Dry Salvages is the poem through which Eliot engages most fully with Romanticism, and it represents, as has long been recognized, (...) his closest approach to the loco-descriptive poem of that movement. Comparison of the many specific motifs that the poem shares with The Prelude allows for a close textured account of the immediate poetic implications of the two writers’ diverging views on the role of the poet, on primitivism, on the rival metaphysics of immanence and transcendence, and on the relative importance of individual and collective identity. The two poems abound in passages sufficiently affined to reveal the differing aims and achievements of each. (shrink)

Era imprescindible una edición de aquellos textos que José Gaos escribiera sobre su gran maestro, Ortega, máxime desde que se ha comenzado a estudiar con un interés inusitado la obra del filósofo asturiano exiliado en México, tal y como se deduce del gran número de trabajos, investigaciones, publicaciones, jornadas, etc., que se han venido realizado, en la última década, mediante el esfuerzo de centros de investigación y universidades españolas como la Universidad de Valencia, la UNED, el CSIC, la U. de (...) Zaragoza, la Fundación Manuel Mindán y la Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, así como en México, tanto en la UNAM como en El Colegio de México. (shrink)

Richard Shusterman suggested that Maurice Merleau-Ponty neglected “‘lived somaesthetic reflection,’ that is, concrete but representational and reflective body consciousness.” While unsure about this assessment of Merleau-Ponty, lived somaesthetic reflection, or what the late Sam Mallin called “body phenomenology”—understood as a meditation on the body reflecting on both itself and the world—is my starting point. Another is John Dewey’s bodily theory of perception, augmented somewhat by Merleau-Ponty. With these starting points, I spent roughly 20 hours with St. Benedict Restores Life to (...) a Young Monk (c. 1360), a work of tempera and gold leaf on panel, by Giovanni Del Biondo, active in Italy from 1356 to 1398, on display in the Art Gallery of Ontario’s permanent collection. Following Dewey’s suggestion that “[t]he eye... is only the channel through which a total response takes place,” meaning that motor, emotional, intellectual and non-visual perceptual capacities become active when we encounter paintings, I describe how the work engaged a range of bodily modalities; and how reflecting on these, in turn, supplied phenomenal articulations of life negating, preserving and enhancing forces important in the culture that produced it, and famously discussed by Friedrich Nietzsche. By virtue of the approach adopted, I also demonstrate Dewey’s belief that intimate engagement with art entails a total coordination of one’s capacities around the artwork, while simultaneously reinforcing Merleau-Ponty’s ideas about perception and how we can find phenomenal articulations of concepts such as the Nietzschean ones just mentioned. While focusing on Del Biondo’s painting, my main purpose is to engage in body phenomenology practices, and to show, in the words of Shusterman, how “[w]e might sharpen our appreciation of art through more attention to our somaesthetic feelings involved in perceiving art” and indeed the world. (shrink)

Leonhard Praeg’s book 'A report on Ubuntu' treats the question of “What is Ubuntu?” in a unique and illuminating fashion. The book begins with an approach that repositions Ubuntu by drawing a crucial distinction between what we mean when we ask the question “What is Ubuntu?”, and what we are doing when we ask this question. Praeg shifts his focus to the latter question. This crucial distinction escapes the gaze of many scholars of Ubuntu, and this book makes this gaze (...) the basis of the entire discussion. This gaze (as an approach or method of doing Ubuntu) emphasises the political nature of asking this question over the primacy of meanings and argumentation for various understandings of Ubuntu, without in any way shying away from engaging the latter. It is not that the meaning of Ubuntu is unimportant, but the significance of this concept must be understood with reference to the political context. In other words, as a pre-condition for any meaningful conversation about Ubuntu, the political context must be brought to the fore and investigated. This book presents, in a fresh and fruitful way, this political nature (the blind spot of Ubuntu discourse) and reality that eludes many a discourse on Ubuntu. (shrink)

Dejando de lado la discusión acerca de si hay o no una filosofía en el trabajo intelectual de Fernando González Ochoa, se propone considerar la obra del pensador colombiano como un trabajo antifilosófico que buscó socavar la seriedad de discusiones teóricas tomadas con solemnidad por intelectuales colombianos de su época. Se estudia, especialmente, la manera como González Ochoa, sin separarse de los supuestos de las tesis raciales y deterministas propuestas por intelectuales como Luis López de Meza o Miguel Jiménez López, (...) asume la discusión sobre la raza con el propósito de “empayasar el concepto” y llevarlo a instancias hilarantes a partir de la exageración, la ironía y las notas de ingenio. Su burla lo condujo a no tomar una posición seria o emprender una crítica de los supuestos relacionados con el problema como pasa, precisamente, con la posición ingeniosa de los antifilósofos. (shrink)

In addition to providing a rebuttal of the “paper-doubts” of the would-be skeptic, pragmatists have also been quite responsive to the social dimensions of doubt. This is true concerning the causes of doubt. This is true also regarding its consequences: doubt has consequences on epistemic trust; on the way we discuss truths, either about the sciences or about the “construction of good”. Readers of Dewey’s The Quest for Certainty and of some of his most important political writings can easily see (...) how practical uncertainty can degenerate into practical and political skepticism, preventing the emergence of the public. This social aspect of the question has received less attention, perhaps, than the general pragmatist stance towards skepticism, and the present symposium offers a rst round of insights into this aspect of the question: the papers retrieved below all cast light on important aspects of the debate on justi cation, on scienti c dogmatism, on irony and skepticism, on doubt and legal theory, on skepticism and political anarchism. (shrink)