It's time that philosophers read Gloria Anzaldúa as a philosopher. Scholars have been hinting at it for some time, but in describing her they still tend to choose the terms “theorist,” “feminist,” and “thinker” instead of “philosopher.” Anzaldúa fits into all of these categories, but from her notes, we know that Anzaldúa also thought of herself as a philosopher. In 2002, for instance, she called herself a “feminist‐visionary‐spiritual‐activist‐poet‐philosopher fiction writer.” This essay argues that we should grant Anzaldúa's wish to be (...) considered a philosopher in addition to the other appellations, and focuses on works that she read and wrote in the first half of her scholarly career, including the publication of Borderlands/La Frontera in 1987. The evidence for the claim that Anzaldúa thought of herself as a philosopher is mostly archival, but some of it also appears in her published works. Once philosophers explicitly begin to recognize Anzaldúa as a philosopher, comparisons between her and other already recognized philosophers will become fuller and bear more fruit. (shrink)

dra. aída hernández castillo has scholars a reason to worry in her Coss Dialogue lecture "Against Discursive Colonialism: Intercultural Dialogues as a Path to Decolonizing Feminist Anthropology." My response philosophically feels around for—and happily fails to find—any boundaries enclosing Hernández Castillo's self-described aim to "decolonize" her feminism. It begins with a story.In an interview with Krista Tippett, Bishop Desmond Tutu recounted an experience that perfectly illustrated a colonized mind. While onboard a flight from Lagos to Jos in Nigeria, Tutu proudly (...) noticed that both of the pilots were black. But as soon as the plane hit turbulence, his years of internalized anti-black... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Anger in a Perilous Environment:María LugonesMariana Alessandriin a hundred years, maybe our commonsense beliefs about anger will come from a distinguished line of Women of Color like Audre Lorde, bell hooks, and María Lugones, who make a case for listening to our anger instead of stifling it. But our ideas about anger still come from ancient Greek and Roman philosophers. Their stories about how anger works and why it (...) is bad have been dominant throughout history, and they are not kind to angry women in the twenty-first century. They have created a perilous environment for us, existentially speaking, by painting anger as irrational, crazy, and ugly. They have left us no way to handle our anger that does not amount to trying to control, suppress, or eradicate it. In this short paper, I contrast a philosophy of anger left to us by ancient Western philosophy with a contemporary one offered by Latina feminist María Lugones. Lugones offers a philosophy of anger that assumes it has something to teach us about our perilous environment.1Part I: Anger Seen in the LightPlato compared passions like anger to a hard-to-control, hot-blooded, black-skinned horse that must be reined in by the "charioteer" of reason (Phaedrus, ln. 253E). He thought we should use self-control to contain our anger, and he was not alone. The Roman Stoic Seneca, who described anger similarly, once told a story about Plato getting livid (Potegal and Novaco 9–24). Instead of beating one of his slaves, Plato froze, his hand drawn back in striking position. A friend asked Plato what he was doing. "I am making an angry man expiate his crime," Plato replied (Seneca, De Ira, Book III, section 12). Plato's freezing was his way of acknowledging that rage is weakness. Seneca formulated this scene into a principle: the only appropriate time to express anger is when you are not angry. Otherwise, you are a slave to your emotion. [End Page 23]I became angry during quarantine. I had been promised a year without teaching or administrative responsibility, but everything changed when the schools went remote. Since my kids were home anyway, I decided to home-school them. But I found myself becoming angry almost daily, and it was upsetting. To make sense of it, I went back to my philosophical sources.I consulted Epictetus, the Stoic philosopher whose Handbook I used to read every year. For the fifteenth time, he told me that "an uneducated man blames others; a partially educated man blames himself. A fully educated man blames no one" (13). While I could not control my circumstances in 2020—Epictetus granted that I did not have the power to end a pandemic or reopen schools—I could control my bursts of anger. Instead of blaming my spouse and kids for my troubles, I should blame myself for expecting life to be easier. Better yet, I should blame no one and accept the new normal gracefully. I also reread the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, the second-century Roman emperor and Stoic who believed that yielding to anger is a sign of weakness (Potegal and Novaco 16). Marcus reformulated one of the central tenets of Stoicism: "Disturbance comes only from within—from our own perceptions" (38). His advice? Lower your expectations. Remember that the only person you can change is yourself. To that end, expect people to irritate you daily and you will be ready for it (17). For me, that meant remembering that having kids meant having messes. But expecting a mess did not clean the table every night, load or unload the dishwasher, or vacuum the crumb-riddled floor. Marcus did not send his servants to clean my house. So, I left him for Aristotle.Aristotle's soul was not a charioteer with horses, but it was tripartite: feelings, predispositions, active conditions. Feelings are hard to change, Aristotle thought, so let's not waste too much energy trying. Predispositions just name the likelihood of feeling a particular feeling. Both categories matter, but chiefly because self-knowledge is a philosophical virtue. Mostly, Aristotle urged us to cultivate our "active conditions." Forever a... (shrink)

Under the light of ancient Western philosophies, our darker moods like grief, anguish, and depression can seem irrational. When viewed through the lens of modern psychology, they can even look like mental disorders. The self-help industry, determined to sell us the promise of a brighter future, can sometimes leave us feeling ashamed that we are not more grateful, happy, or optimistic. Night Vision invites us to consider a different approach to life, one in which we stop feeling bad about feeling (...) bad. -/- In this powerful and disarmingly intimate book, Existentialist philosopher Mariana Alessandri draws on the stories of a diverse group of nineteenth- and twentieth-century philosophers and writers to help us see that our suffering is a sign not that we are broken but that we are tender, perceptive, and intelligent. Thinkers such as Audre Lorde, María Lugones, Miguel de Unamuno, C. S. Lewis, Gloria Anzaldúa, and Søren Kierkegaard sat in their anger, sadness, and anxiety until their eyes adjusted to the dark. Alessandri explains how readers can cultivate “night vision” and discover new sides to their painful moods, such as wit and humor, closeness and warmth, and connection and clarity. -/- Night Vision shows how, when we learn to embrace the dark, we begin to see these moods—and ourselves—as honorable, dignified, and unmistakably human. (shrink)

Scholars interested in Miguel de Unamuno’s obsession with Don Quixote usually refer to his Quixotism as a philosophy or “way of life” that Unamuno eventually outgrew. Unamuno himself called Quixotism a philosophy and an ethics, but he also called it a religion. This is the most accurate characterization of Quixotism, given how it functioned in both his works and his life. Unamuno’s Quixotism incorporates many typical religious features like a god figure, followers, worship, an idea of faith, an eschatology, and (...) a sacred text. This essay: 1) paints Quixotism as a religion and shows how it functioned throughout Unamuno’s works, and 2) argues that Quixotism was not a phase for Unamuno. Unamuno created and practiced the religion of Quixotism throughout his life, even as he was wrestling with Christianity, so that a comprehensive understanding of Unamuno’s struggle with faith must include the study of his Quixotism. (shrink)

Before the Department of Homeland Security instituted the Migrant Protection Protocols in January 2019, as many as 1,000 Central American refugees passed each day through Catholic Charities’ Humanitarian Respite Center, where they received food, clothing, a shower, toiletries, and sandwiches for the road. Sister Norma Pimentel founded the Humanitarian Respite Center in 2014 to “restore human dignity” to refugees who had been degraded and vilified during their dangerous journeys north, not least by way of their processing by the US government. (...) Sister Norma has inspired countless people, including me, to engage with the community as a form of place-based philosophical activism, that is, of situated and engaged teaching, scholarship, and service. In this essay I read Sister Norma as a feminist pragmatist in the historical and philosophical lineage of Jane Addams, and I aim to provide an example of how a feminist-pragmatist approach can support and encourage philosophical activism in our communities. Feminist scholars can learn from feminist pragmatism the importance of “being-with,” “sympathetic understanding,” and “a larger social impulse.” Feminist pragmatism encourages academics to become place-based philosophical activists who use their teaching, research, and service in order to press for social justice. (shrink)

In the Western classical tradition music criticism represents one of the most complex and influential forms of performance assessment and evaluation. However, in the age of peer opinion sharing and quick communication channels it is not clear what place music critics’ judgments still hold in the classical music market. This article presents expert music critics’ view on their role, function, and influence. It is based on semi-structured interviews with 14 native English- and German-speaking critics who had an average of 32 (...) years professional activity in classical music review. We present the first visual model to summarize music critics’ descriptions of their role and responsibilities, writing processes, and their influences. The model distinguishes six roles : consumer adviser, teacher, judge, writer, stakeholder, and artist advocate. It identifies core principles governing critical writing for music as well as challenges that arise from balancing the above six responsibilities whilst remaining true to an implicit code of conduct. Finally, it highlights the factors that inform critics’ writing in terms of the topics they discuss and the discursive tools they employ. We show that music critics self-identify as highly skilled mediators between artists, producers and consumers, and justify their roles as judge and teacher based on a wealth of experience as against the influx of pervasive amateur reviews. Our research approach also offers occupation-based insights into professional music review standards, including the challenges of maintaining objectivity and resisting commercial pressures. This article offers a new viewpoint on music critics’ judgments and recommendations that helps to explain their expectations and reflections. (shrink)

in "whites: made in america: Advancing American Philosophers' Discourse on Race," the Reverend Thandeka claims that the terms "racism" and "white privilege" can't explain what motivated the majority of Donald Trump's voters, since most of them wouldn't identify as racist or privileged. Thandeka rejects Hillary Clinton's description of Trump supporters as "deplorable," a description that fits into a racial narrative that considers whiteness to be an issue of hatred toward blacks. Thandeka believes this narrative fails to account for the shame, (...) insecurity, and fear experienced by whites and perpetrated by "whiteness." She asks us to analyze our racial terms to help create a "new racial discourse on whiteness in... (shrink)

Is it possible that children experience something we could judge as the sublime? Some pivotal conjectures have been elicited to positively answer these questions; however, this general topic still stands in need of fuller theoretical and empirical insights. Since taking up this challenge may have important implications in the ever-expanding field of aesthetic education, in this article I will give a philosophical account of the experience of the sublime in 8-10 children, identifying both its plau- sible components and its markers, (...) which opens up future empirical inquiries. (shrink)

In Memory, History, Forgetting, Ricœur does not provide us with a clear definition of collective memory. In this article, we will try to show how it could nevertheless be described, based on the same text, as the capacity for recognition, by way of reciprocal attribution, memories that are engraved in temporal spaces and are shared with our neighbors and, through them, with strangers. To verify this hypothesis, we will analyse Ricœur’s reflection on architecture as public memory’s engraving into space, presented (...) for the first time in the text “Architecture et narrativité.” Lastly, we will consider imagination and bodily memory, i.e. habit emanating from the act of inhabiting, as the conditions of possibility for the crystallization of memories in shared places. (shrink)

The political role of architecture in urban space design is still a significant philosophical issue. Starting from the assumption that cities can actually be understood as material texts, Paul Ricoeur’s hermeneutics has described the architecture as a creative mimesis of space. Textual hermeneutics applied to architecture, if crossed with Ricoeur’s reading of ideology and utopia, allows today to qualify the figure of the architect as a critical and transformative narrator of the urban dimension, and, thus, to identify his political task (...) in the imaginative effort of thinking a utopian elsewhere which is, at the same time, rooted in cultural and historical identities of designed places. (shrink)

In this article, we argue that Paul Ricœur’s hermeneutics of spaces and the aesthetics vision of the landscape as a performance, based on the contemporary theories of Erika Fischer-Lichte, can integrate each other through the mediation of Mikel Dufrenne’s phenomenology of the a priori. In particular, we will show how the representations and the hermeneutics of a landscape as a peculiar “text” are essentially connected with its the pre-reflective experience, which, being made possible by the activation of precise material – (...) and therefore historical and cultural – a priori, can be thus translated into images and words. By intertwining hermeneutics, phenomenology, and performative esthetics we will provide with a non-reductive philosophical description of a landscape, i.e., a definition that does not neglect the aspects of it suggested by its linguistic pre-comprehension and artistic representations. (shrink)

This article examines Gloria Anzaldúa’s critical appropriation of Mexican philosophical sources, especially in the writing of Borderlands/La Frontera. We argue that Anzaldúa effectively contributed to la filosofía de lo mexicano by developing an Inter-American Philosophy of Mexicanness. 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 at the Benson Latin American Collection at (...) the University of Texas at Austin. The eight Mexican philosophical sources we examine and discuss here are: 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 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)

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)

La presente obra se trata de un ejercicio de reflexión colectiva para [re]pensar a Bobbio con verdaderos artículos científicos por parte de los estudiosos de su obra más acreditados en Europa y América Latina: Michelangelo Bovero, Arnaldo Córdova, José Fernández Santillán, Ermanno Vitale, entre otros. A la vez que un homenaje al filósofo turinés, se logra con estos textos una revisión crítica de muchas de las ideas clave de su pensamiento a la luz de los retos del siglo XXI: (...) democracia, terrorismo, derechos fundamentales, etc. (shrink)

Using data from four different samples of full-time employees (Ntotal = 2,474), the present study was aimed to introduce and demonstrate the validity and reliability of the Organizational-Based General Self-esteem Scale (OB-GSE) a new six-item self-report scale to measure organizational-based self-esteem (OBSE) at work. Results provided evidence of (1) validity (internal, external, and convergent), (2) reliability, and (3) temporal stability of the OB-GSE scale. All in all, results attested the usefulness and the effectiveness of the OB-GSE scale.

Tomando como punto de partida un análisis de los conceptos que aparecen en el título de su participación, Bovero sostiene que atribuir toda especie de derechos al «ciudadano», al miembro de una comunidad determinada, cierra la posibilidad de considerar el problema de los derechos de la persona y su específica relevancia actual en un mundo atravesado por grandes masas de migraciones de personas desesperadas. Más en general, concebir los derechos fundamentales como derechos de ciudadanía impide plantear correctamente el problema de (...) su defensa, cuyo nivel crucial sólo puede ser el supranacional. (shrink)

Passed away in the early summer of 2021, Virgilio Mura practiced political philosophy following the method of conceptual analysis, in the wake of the tradition generated by neo-empiricism and far from “analytical philosophy” that become dominant in the last half century. In Mura’s thought, seriousness as rigor in the application of the analytical method is combined with the defence of secularism, expressed in his stance in favour of a form of relativism that should not be confused with indifferentism.