Latin American and Latinx philosophers have a long and rich history of deep engagement in public life through a variety of different projects and venues. This chapter offers a brief survey of the historical development and practice of philosophy in public life in Latin American and Latinx traditions. Because of their unique histories, it engages public philosophy in Mexico and Argentina separately. The chapter shows that a guiding thread in Argentinian public philosophy is a deep‐rooted concern about the threats created (...) by political and intellectual authoritarianism and strategies for pushing back against this oppression by developing emancipatory practices and democratic alternatives. This work runs through a long line of Argentinian philosophers from José Ingenieros and Alejandro Korn to María Lugones and Diana Maffía. Public philosophy is clearly a vibrant and ongoing enterprise in contemporary Mexico. Argentina also possesses a long and rich tradition of public philosophy. (shrink)

Feminisms in the second half of the twentieth century were reshaped by the efforts to end violence against women. Feminist activists in national and international settings invented concepts to refer to previously unquestioned societal practices as oppressive to women and changed the world by naming them. In this article, I engage with the concepts of femicide/feminicidio : the murder of women for gender reasons. I follow the history of this concept and its incursion into the broader political and public sphere (...) in Latin America. Focusing on the Mexican case, I show how the study of national feminist histories is relevant to the history of women’s activism in the international arena. This article contributes to the history of concepts by showing the linguistic distinctions and connections of feminist concepts in different sociocultural environments. Overall, this research argues in favor of studying feminist concepts with Latin American perspectives to articulate the complexity of the world today. (shrink)

Following the line of thought articulated by Gallegos-Ordorica (2019), the main goal of this article is to argue that the 19th century Venezuelan-Chilean polymath Andrés Bello should be included within the history of the pragmatist tradition as an important precursor insofar as his masterpiece, Filosofía del Entendimiento (Philosophy of the Understanding), exhibits many views and attitudes that are characteristic of pragmatism. A second and narrower goal of this article is to show that the specific kind of proto-pragmatist position that (...) Bello endorses in Philosophy of the Understanding bears remarkable similarities to the neo-pragmatist view of Huw Price and to argue that Bello’s metaphorical idea-signs can be potentially useful in explaining the great variety of functions that what Price calls “i-representations” have within his functional pluralism. (shrink)

The Novohispanic nun Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz has not been traditionally considered as a philosopher within the Anglophone philosophical sphere because her writings are primarily poems and plays. In the last three decades, only a few philosophers have engaged with Sor Juana's works. However, their scholarship has focused only on a narrow range of issues, such as Sor Juana's defense of the right of women to be educated, and has neglected other dimensions of her thought, such as her (...) position on self-control. In this study, I argue that, in contraposition to traditional interpretations of Sor Juana's views on self-control offered by Octavio Paz and Anna More, it is better to read her as adopting a stance on self‐control that prefigures a position recently adopted by Al Mele (who distinguishes having self‐control from being self‐controlled). In particular, I show that the interpretation that I propose is better than the others I discuss because it fits better Sor Juana's apologetic goals. (shrink)

​This paper examines the life and work of the Novohispanic philosopher Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, who used a great deal of irony to respond to what, we argue, were gender-based microaggressions in 17th century New Spain. The case of Sor Juana is particularly interesting not only because it suggests that microaggressions are not the product of our time, as has been suggested in the literature, but also because it reveals some of the advantages as well as limitations of (...) using irony when one is subject to microaggression. The case of Sor Juana also provides insights regarding the difficulties of using irony to address microaggressions that take place in the classroom. (shrink)

In this chapter, I argue that the insurrectionist ethics initially articulated by Leonard Harris, and further developed by other scholars such as Lee McBride III, Jacoby Carter, and Kristie Dotson, can fruitfully be deployed to understand how resistance movements and liberatory struggles have been framed in Mexico by some prominent intellectuals. To be more precise, I argue that one can read the historical work México a través de los siglos. El Virreinato from the nineteenth century Mexican historian and novelist Vicente (...) Riva Palacio as articulating a form of insurrectionist ethics adapted to the Mexican context to the extent that it exemplifies the core features that Harris identifies in insurrectionist ethics. (shrink)

The Venezuelan-Chilean humanist Andrés Bello has been recognized as one of the most distinguished intellectuals of the 19th century—one of the last polymaths of the stature of figures such as Athanasius Kircher, Gottfried Leibniz or Benjamin Franklin. Indeed, his numerous contributions span fields such as grammar, poetry, civil law, diplomacy, education, political theory, philology and philosophy. However, despite having composed one of the most important philosophical treatises ever written in Spanish, his philosophical proposals have not been engaged with a substantial (...) way by scholars of the Anglophone world. Only a few scholars such as... (shrink)

In this paper, we explore the connections between the culinary art and the poetic work by Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. In particular, following a detailed study of the analogies between, on the one hand, food and culinary preparation, and on the other hand, poetry and composition, we show that culinary art functions as cause and catalyst of Sor Juana’s poetic creation. Also, we show that, for the hieronymite nun, there is an intimate and profound relation between good seasoning, (...) beauty and moral good. (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)

En el presente artículo, exploramos las conexiones que existen entre el arte culinario y la obra poética de Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. En particular, usamos un estudio detallado de las analogías que emergen entre la comida y la preparación culinaria por un lado, y la poesía y la composición poética, por otro lado. En este artículo mostramos que el arte culinario funciona como causa o catalizador de la creación poética y que existe una relación íntima y profunda entre (...) el buen sazón, lo bello, y el bien para la monja jerónima. (shrink)