ABSTRACT Little has been said about Martin Heidegger’s influence on Latin American philosophy. This article addresses this oversight by investigating how twentieth-century Argentine philosopher Rodolfo Kusch uses ser and estar and the formula estar-siendo to dethrone Heidegger’s famed Dasein. Drawing on estar’s etymological roots in the semantic element, Kusch recovers a phenomenological tradition rooted in the Greek histemi instead of the on of “ontology.” To champion Kusch’s phenomenology, this article borrows from analytic philosophy. Beginning in the words’ semantics, this article (...) illustrates ser and estar as normative pragmatic functions to understand Kusch’s deployment of the words as phenomenological concepts. Following Kusch, it is argued that estar has an ostensive function meant to signal facticity, rather than to register propositional content apophantically, while ser’s pragmatic function is declarative; it passes on warranted premises for novel inferences. The article concludes by cashing estar-siendo out as a philosophical speech act that revokes the self-verifying nature of accept truths by pointing such truths back to their factive origins. Accordingly, this article brings together continental philosophy, semantics, and analytic strands of pragmatism. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This article develops a phenomenological account to characterize the openness of the future. More specifically, showing that phenomenological experience is necessary to derive the belief that the future is open by adopting a realist reading of phenomenology where our experience can be used to speculate beyond the thought-world correlation postulated by Quentin Meillassoux and show that this openness is best captured as an indeterminacy of the future itself. This indeterminacy of the future is the indeterminacy of which events are (...) actualized or made to happen out of all the potential events. Here, our phenomenological experience allows us to feel what it is like to have the ability to participate in an event and make it happen. We can then generalize such ability to all other objects even inanimate ones. As a result, we have a phenomenological but non-anthropocentric account of the openness of the future. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This article examines the two carceral novels (The Walls of Water and The Hole) of the Mexican philosopher, writer and labor activist José Revueltas using as a lens Richard Rorty’s views on solidarity—particularly, Rorty’s views on what solidarity consists in, how it is developed and the effects it has, and this article argues that, if Rorty’s views on solidarity are correct, Revueltas’s carceral novels have a remarkable ability to expand our solidarity in virtue of their raw portrayal of the (...) shared humiliation and suffering endured by prisoners within the Mexican penal system, which Revueltas was well acquainted with. Specifically, this article shows that Revueltas’s characters in the two novels develop solidarity in virtue of a common susceptibility to pain and humiliation, that they show what solidarity consists in since they share common selfish hopes about small things that are woven into their final vocabulary and, finally, that they illustrate the effects of solidarity as they are forced to live in environments where all traditional differences (e.g., race, tribe, religion, etc.) eventually fade. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This article explores the phenomenon of stay-at-home daughterhood to demonstrate how this practice provides a stark contrast to the requirements and rewards of genuine education. It does so, the article argues, both through its dependence upon isolation and indoctrination and its allegiance to conceptions of femininity and masculinity that reveal themselves to be uninhabitable, the latter by trying to cultivate an impossible aspiration to omnipotence and the former by violating what Peirce identifies as “the sole rule of reason,” which (...) is “to not block the road of inquiry.”. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Jean-Jacques Rousseau is widely credited as the originator of the modern autobiography. To the contemporary reader, his work in the Confessions is a familiar exer-cise in self-discovery and self-evaluation. Rousseau’s project is a courageous one: to lay bare the inner and often secret history of the self and share this revelation with the world. It is this project that was to change the way the individual communed with themselves and additionally changed the way the individual presented themselves to others. (...) The claim the author wants advance in this article is the following: Our primary mode of communication is deeply autobiographical in nature, and yet, the kind of autobiographical work in which we are engaged has radically evolved such that it no longer accomplishes the task that has traditionally defined it. This article argues that rather than affirming the self via a journey of self-discovery and eventual recognition, autobiographical work now explicitly rejects the possibility of genuine recognition and, as a result, alienates and isolates the individual such that active participation within a community is not possible. (shrink)

ABSTRACT The concept of atmosphere is now central within phenomenology, critical theory, and hermeneutics, but it has not yet played a similarly significant role in contemporary pragmatism. Part of the problem is that the term “atmosphere” is not especially salient in classical pragmatism, though the ideas encompassed by that term do play an important role there. This article explores some important ways that classical pragmatist philosophy deploys the ambiguous, polyvalent, and lexically multiple notion of atmosphere. Along with its primary scientific (...) sense as the mixture of gases that surrounds the earth, atmosphere has the central meaning of mood, tone, or felt quality that pervades a situation or place. Having elsewhere shown the vital role of mood in pragmatism, this article extends the study of atmosphere in pragmatism by considering how that notion functions through other terms, including the term “atmosphere” itself, but also through closely associated terms like “ambience,” “climate,” “weather,” “milieu,” “aura,” “halo,” “penumbra,” “situation,” or “felt quality.” This article will focus on the pragmatism of James and Dewey, because the term “atmosphere” is strikingly absent in C. S. Peirce, notwithstanding his many years as a meteorologist for the US Coast Survey. (shrink)