Latin American Philosophy for the Non-Specialist: A Word of Encouragement

This is a guest post by Robert Eli Sanchez, Jr., Occidental College

Over the years, colleagues have expressed interest in teaching Latin American philosophy (LAP). And they’ve expressed hesitation. Often when I tell them what I’m working on, or what I’m teaching, they’ll respond with some version of, “Oh, I would love to teach LAP, but…”. Today, I’d like to raise and respond to a few of those “buts”. For those of you who are interested but hesitant, my aim is to encourage you to take the leap (or dip the toes). And for those of you who aren’t yet interested, perhaps I can entice you with a reading or two.

One of the biggest worries I hear from colleagues is that, even if they wanted to introduce LAP into their syllabus or research, they wouldn’t know where to begin. Without a familiarity with the history of LAP, it’s not clear how to choose a text or represent the tradition in a non-haphazard way. And the idea of familiarizing oneself with entire tradition just sounds like too much work.

I can sympathize with this reservation. As an undergraduate I remember having the wacky notion that there must be philosophers in Mexico, but not knowing how to find them. As a graduate student working on a dissertation on Wittgenstein and Kierkegaard, I remember trying to piece together some story based on the names I had come across (e.g. Las Casas, Sor Juana, Ortega y Gasset, Vasconcelos, Ramos), but feeling like I was reading every fifth page of a Garcia Marquez novel, not knowing who was related to whom. But what I remember most was the feeling I had as a new professor, knowing that the first iterations of teaching LAP were haphazard and largely unsuccessful.

Thankfully, a lot has changed in the last 15 years and now one doesn’t have to reconstruct a narrative on one’s own. In fact, this was precisely the main challenge – among others – I had in mind when editing Latin American and Latinx Philosophy: A Collaborative Introduction. What I thought LAP in the US needed most was a guide that would enable the non-specialist to teach an entire course on LAP, with confidence, and without having to drop everything else. I wanted the text I wish I had when I started out, a text I could have built a syllabus around, and one that would equally serve the undergraduate, graduate student, and instructor alike.

To achieve this, I gave contributors a template based on the chapter I had written, and I asked them to include the following elements, which I believed would make learning a new tradition less daunting:

1. A close analysis of several canonical texts.
2. Large excerpts of the primary text.
3. The historical and philosophical background needed to situate the texts.
4. A discussion of their contemporary philosophical relevance.

I also organized the text more or less chronologically so that, collectively, the chapters serve as an introduction to the history of LAP. Again, part of the aim was to reconstruct a non-arbitrary narrative that gives reader a sense of how these texts, authors, and themes constitute a tradition. (See the TOC below.)

Another hesitation colleagues have expressed, though not always explicitly, is skepticism concerning the value of LAP, either as it pertains to their own research or in general. There are several ways of responding to this skepticism; some are practical, some philosophical, and some metaphilosophical. We don’t have enough space here to convince anyone who isn’t already on board with the value of studying other traditions, so I’ll just mention a few of the most obvious responses and offer my own Introduction to Philosophy (Philosophy 101) as a case study.

On a practical note, a more diverse curriculum will help to attract more students of color to philosophy, and that’s a good thing for students of color, for philosophy, and I believe for society. Studying other traditions might also make you a better philosopher. The Latin American tradition, for instance, is long and rich, and I would argue distinctive. It has produced countless cultural resources that, on account of their distinctiveness, might help you to think about traditional problems anew, under a different light, or in a different key.  

For those who aren’t already on board with studying a different tradition, however, the most compelling argument we can make is metaphilosophical. It’s also the hardest argument to make because it asks for the biggest investment. Again, we can’t fully develop the argument here, but it goes something like this.  

It starts with the claim that the modern European and Anglo-American tradition is characterized by what we might call epistemic imperialism. Philosophy is not just Eurocentric; it is imperialistic as it has found a way to effectively cancel other traditions. And here’s the thing: it is able to exclude other traditions a priori and thus without compunction.

This is a difficult argument to make compelling, in part because what it wants to say is that we don’t exclude other traditions by choice. That is, we don’t carefully inquire into the histories of different traditions, pore over their texts, and only then decide that they are wanting or inferior. Instead, we exclude on the basis of a view of ourselves, or rather, by taking ourselves out of the picture. We say something like, (our) philosophy is the pursuit of ‘maximally general truths’, as Russell put it, which are achieved only by dislocating ourselves from a place and time and abstracting from all self- or cultural-interest. Philosophy, in a word, is universal and describes the not-self.

So the moment someone is in a position to defend the value of another tradition, and do so on account of its difference or one’s own commitment to it, it is automatically disqualified: difference/commitment = particular/political = not universal = not philosophy. Thus, the trial never even begins because there is no defendant: whatever is under consideration either is the same (i.e., what we already do and just philosophy) or is not philosophy.

To be clear, this is not an argument for being more inclusive. This argument isn’t going to work on anyone who isn’t already convinced. The metaphilosophical argument to be made here is that this view of philosophy is an illusion and is motivated. And its conclusion is that the only way to recognize this illusion as an illusion is to step outside one’s own tradition by stepping into another. What we need is contrast, for without it, we aren’t in a position to make a choice. The idea is that it’s only by fully investing ourselves in another tradition that we gain some perspective on our own, perspective that we don’t currently have.

I hesitated to even mention this argument because I can’t fully do it justice here. But I hope it’s enough to provoke discussion. In the meantime, I’ll describe how my research in LAP has helped to shape my Introduction to Philosophy, and how students responded to it this semester.

Like most Intros, we start with Plato’s early dialogues and the Symposium. But we counter with an introduction to Aztec ethics and metaphysics, in part to contrast two very different worldviews. We proceed to Descartes’s Meditations and a brief introduction to modern epistemology, but situate the text in the larger context of conquest and colonization in the Americas. To flesh out this context, we study the debate at Valladolid (1550-1551), in which disputants debate whether the indigenous peoples of the Americas are fully human or natural slaves, according to the theory of natural slavery that Aristotle presents in the Politics. Not only does this debate telegraph the philosophy of race that we discuss at the end of the semester, but it is an crucial event in “the philosophy of liberation”, whose guiding idea is that the ego cogito, as well as the European notion of “humanity”, presupposes the ego conquero, as well as the idea that geography matters in philosophy.

After contrasting Greek and Aztec philosophy, and discussing the intellectual legacy of colonization, we read a beautiful essay by the Mexican historian-philosopher Edmundo O’ Gorman, “Art or Monstrosity”, in which O’ Gorman describes the temptations of comparing and contrasting “exotic cultures” and imagines us critiquing the classical notion of beauty (as represented by Plato) from the point of view of the “monstrous” (as represented by the Aztecs), rather than the other way around. What we might find, he muses, is that if there is anything universal in art, it is the desire to undo the “gigantic fraud” peddled by the Greeks, whose beauty aspired to an unattainable model of rational perfection at the expense of fully appreciating the underlying fluidity and ambiguity and imperfection of reality and human existence.

When I envisioned this version of 101, I wanted to end with a contemporary philosophical topic (the metaphysics of race). We read Du Bois’s “The Conservation of Races” and Appiah’s “The Uncompleted Argument” to set up the debate between conserving and eliminating the concept. We also read Alcoff’s “Is Latino/a Identity a Racial Identity”, as it complicates the dichotomy between conserving and eliminating, and the notion of reality. But what I didn’t realize was just how naturally this conversation would flow from the previous modules. Students weren’t just thinking about the arguments in front of them; they weren’t just thinking about the metaphysics of race. They were also thinking about the relation between cultural identity and knowledge (which helped them appreciate Du Bois), the power and limits of reason (which made them critical of Appiah), and the legacy of conquest, colonization, and slavery (which enriched their reading of Alcoff).

This is an unusual course, I suppose, but only in that it doesn’t give pride of place to one tradition. The strategy is not to introduce marginalized voices into a traditional syllabus, but to juxtapose contrasting perspectives, side by side, and emphasize the value of their difference. And students seem to appreciate this approach. Here are a few of their comments this semester: 

• The fact that it covered a wide variety of texts authors was a big strength. It can be tempting to relegate non-western philosophies to more advanced classes, but there's really no reason to.
  
  
• This course really cemented my desire to get a graduate degree in philosophy. Originally, I thought I was going to apply for PoliSci doctoral programs, but the sheer breadth of this course as well as how well it was taught definitely shifted my plan. While I was knowledgeable regarding all of the readings that you'd expect to see in a PHIL 101 course (Descartes, Aristotle, Plato, etc.), he introduced me to Latin American philosophy, which provides a much deeper understanding of the world and how it functions.

• I really feel that I benefited from learning about Aztec and Latin American philosophy. My mind was opened in a lot of ways and I view the world a little differently now.

• Incorporating his work on Mexcian/Latinx philosophy into the course was extremely fascinating as it helped to expand my concept of philosophy outside of the Eurocentric tradition.

• I think Professor Sanchez chose a super great assortment of material for this course, and really encouraged critical and analytical thinking in a more philosophical way that is essential to a 101 class. I also think Professor Sanchez did a great job sparking interest in topics people would otherwise be unaware of - particularly in terms of non-Western phil.

Table of Contents of Latin American and Latinx Philosophy: A Collaborative Introduction

Introduction

Robert Eli Sanchez, Jr.

Chapter 1: Philosophy without Europe

James Maffie

Chapter 2: "The Indian Problem": Conquest and the Valladolid Debate

Alejandro Santana

Chapter 3: The Continental Struggle for Democracy: The American Wars of Independence as Experiments in Justice

Jose-Antonio Orosco

Chapter 4: Nation-Building through Education: Positivism and its Transformations in Mexico

Alexander V. Stehn

Chapter 5: The Philosophy of Mexican Culture

Robert Eli Sanchez, Jr.

Chapter 6: Mexican Existentialism

Carlos Alberto Sánchez

Chapter 7: Liberation Philosophy

Grant Silva

Chapter 8: Latin American and Latinx Feminisms

Stephanie Rivera Berruz

Chapter 9: Indigenism in Peru and Bolivia

Kim Díaz

Chapter 10: Latinx Philosophy and the Ethics of Migration

José Jorge Mendoza

Chapter 11: Latinx Identity

Andrea Pitts

Chapter 12: Metaphilosophy: Defining Latin American and Latinx Philosophy

Lori Gallegos de Castillo and Francisco Gallegos

Comments

[Daniel Weltman]

Another good place to go for some sources of things to potentially teach is Manuel Vargas's page for people interested in studying Latin American philosophy: http://vargasphilosophy.com/lsmphil.htm

It lists a lot of useful texts (scroll down to "what should I read?").

[Kevin Harrelson]

This is a solid post and an even better program for an Intro course. For me there is simply too much in it. But as someone who does a History sequence and has struggled to decolonize it adequately, this approach is very helpful. How to position Aztecs next to Greeks? I’ve been struggling with that in Ancient. How to put colonization in with the typical European sequence? I do like the idea of emphasizing the Valladolid debates, which can be supplemented in any direction.

For me this all gets easier in an Intro, because I don’t feel the pull of chronology in that case. Thanks to Robert and Helen for the post!!

[Miroslav Imbrisevic]

Let's not forget the great Argentinian legal scholar Carlos Santiago Nino. A lot of his work is available in English. He wrote on punishment, restorative justice, human rights and democracy, among other things. Thomas Scanlon engages with Nino's work in 'What we owe to each other' and in the essay 'Punishment and the Rule of Law' (1999).