Inclusive intersections: US Pragmatism and Mexican Philosophy

Traditionally, philosophical inquiry across the Americas was understood to have emerged and developed in a rather provincial and European-oriented fashion in the sense that philosophical traditions and key figures in countries such as the US and Mexico actively engaged, not with each other, but with European traditions and figures (for instance, US figures such as Emerson read and actively engaged Kant’s thought while Mexican authors such as Justo Sierra and Francisco Bulnes read and actively engaged the positivist thought of Auguste Comte). As a result, scholars have paid relatively little attention to how US and Mexican philosophers have engaged with each other’s works and ideas. In contrast with this traditional but still prevalent view (on both sides of the border, but particularly in the US), our panel aims to show two things: (1) the view that philosophical traditions on both sides of the US-Mexico border developed separately, without engaging each other’s works and ideas, is simply wrong since there have been numerous intersections between philosophical traditions (e.g., between US pragmatism and Mexican existentialism) as well as important historical attempts to create an inclusive philosophical community spanning the Americas and (2) there is much to gain by continuing the pursuit of efforts to build and maintain an inclusive Inter-American community of philosophical inquiry by studying the intersections between different traditions and figures that have flourished on both sides of the border. Our panel will provide evidence for these two general theses through three papers that explore several points of intersection between US pragmatism and Mexican philosophy. The first paper presents the influence of William James’ pragmatism on the thought of the Mexican philosopher Antonio Caso (1883-1946) and explores why, in contrast to standard scholarly genealogies and geographies of pragmatism, Caso presented not Charles Sanders Peirce but rather Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche as the first pragmatist philosophers and William James as the great “systematizer of pragmatism.” Drawing upon Caso’s insights, the paper offers an account of what makes pragmatism capacious enough to accommodate the German philosopher Nietzsche, the American philosopher James, and Caso himself under the same roof in spite of their substantial philosophical differences. The second paper engages the ideas of Samuel Ramos (1897-1959) in relation to the pragmatism of Charles S. Peirce (1839-1914). It argues that, although Ramos has been recently criticized (Houvenaghel 2014) for offering logically deficient ‘proofs’ in his major book El perfil del hombre y la cultura en Mexico (1934), one can refute these criticisms by examining Ramos’ book through the lens of Peirce's pragmatic maxim (which Peirce considered as a logical principle that Ramos clearly employed). Finally, the third paper shows how the progressive reception of Peirce’s work in Mexico has promoted among Mexican scholars the development of an inclusive community of inquiry that not only brings together various philosophers working in different areas but also experts from other disciplines. More specifically, it shows how the works of Mauricio Beuchot (1950 - ), a prominent contemporary Mexican philosopher who has written important works on medieval philosophy, philosophy of language and hermeneutics, rely on Peirce’s thought to create interdisciplinary lines of inquiry.