PUBLISHING Hermeneutics of Identity: Latin American Philosophy’s Search (original) (raw)
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THE QUEST FOR RECOGNITION: THE CASE OF LATIN AMERICAN PHILOSOPHY
2019
Latin American philosophy has long been concerned with its philosophical identity. In this paper I argue that the search for Latin American philosophical identity is motivated by a desire for recognition that largely hinges on its relationship to European thought. Given that motivations are seldom easily accessible, the essay comparatively draws on Africana and Native American metaphilosophical reflections. Such juxtapositions serve as a means of establishing how philosophical exclusions have themselves motivated and structured how Latin American philosophy has understood its own quest for philosophical identity. In closing, I gesture toward the possibilities of shifting the conversation away from what makes Latin American philosophy distinct toward one of praxis-what do we want Latin American philosophy to do.
This article outlines the history of Latin American philosophy: the thinking of its indigenous peoples, the debates over conquest and colonization, the arguments for national independence in the eighteenth century, the challenges of nation-building and modernization in the nineteenth century, the concerns over various forms of development in the twentieth century, and the diverse interests in Latin American philosophy during the opening decades of the twenty-first century. Rather than attempt to provide an exhaustive and impossibly long list of scholars’ names and dates, this article outlines the history of Latin American philosophy while trying to provide a meaningful sense of detail by focusing briefly on individual thinkers whose work points to broader philosophical trends that are inevitably more complex and diverse than any encyclopedic treatment can hope to capture.
Information Development, 2019
This article presents certain Latin American traits from the works of four prestigious and contemporary Latin American writers: Gioconda Belli, Gonzalo Rojas, Augusto Monterroso y Juan José Arreola. The traits discussed include politics, the religious cult, the messianic vision, family, couples and the father figure. We argue that it is very important for people to understand their own culture and identity, to explore and not abandon the conversations about their countries' literary works, as they reflect, report and critique them.
How is it possible to understand a specific cultural determination of human praxis, especially the productive and consumptive one, without falling into ethnologising human subjects in their everyday forms of reproduction, or construct biological fixations? The former senior faculty of the UNAM Bolívar Echeverría (Riobamba, Ecuador 1941 – Mexico City 2010), who does not limit human culture to its ‘elevated’ forms and bases his analysis in the precise manner of material reproduction, finds an adequate image of this relationship between freedom and tradition, between individuality and a historically- and geographically-determined collectivity. This image lies in human languages, their innumerable speech acts and in a science that studies the relation of interdependence among them: semiotics.
Latin American Philosophy: Some Vices
The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, 2006
We are invisible": this melancholic assertion alludes to the "non-place" that we occupy as Latin American philosophers or, in general, as philosophers in the Spanish or Portuguese languages. We tend to survive as mere ghosts teaching courses and writing texts, perhaps some memorable ones, which, however, seldom spark anybody's interest, among other reasons, because almost no one takes the time to read them. In saying this, I do not mean to call upon a useless pathos, nor do I mean to complain, or thrust forth a challenge. I am simply confi rming a fact, and a widely acknowledged one at that. I wish to inquire a little into this invisibility. Later I will look into how the experience of our much acclaimed essay may help in fi ghting it.
Critical Genealogies of the History of Latin American Philosophy
In “Critical Genealogies of the History of Latin American Philosophy,” Andrea Pitts gives an account of how Schutte’s conceptual framework provides important hermeneutical tools that can be used as “strategies to destabilize and decenter the hegemonic speaking positions of U.S. philosophical discourse” by imparting a critical dimension to the development of genealogies in the History of Latin American philosophy. Using two of Schutte’s essays, “Postmodernity and Utopia” and “Cultural Alterity,” Pitts applies the notion of cross-cultural incommensurability to analyses of nineteenth-century narratives of emancipation (such as those found in the works of Domingo Faustino Sarmiento) to argue in favor of a more open, “polyphonic register through which we can make sense of [the] varied dimensions within Latin American thought.”
The Originary Question of Latin American Philosophy
Latinx Philosophy Conference, Rutgers, 2018
I presume philosophy to be a practical undertaking, an asking of ‘how’ in contrast to ‘why,’ as Rodolfo Kusch suggests. And as I hear it, the question of Latin American philosophy, especially when heard within Anglophone academia, compels us to focus on the way we do philosophy, on the forms in which we make it. When the questions of thinking are taken up through experiments in making, philosophy is understood to be praxis, and more to the point with respect to Latin American philosophy, a poetic praxis. In turn, following Mayra Rivera’s example as she works out what she calls “thinking bodies” infused by the “spirit of Latina incarnational imagination,” I identify the Latin American philosopher in el norte as one who allows themself to be conjured by the poets’ enchanment.