The Need for Inter-American Philosophy: Anticipating and Solving Pedagogical Challenges

Given the historical and contemporary conditions of philosophical education at the undergraduate, graduate and professional levels, our panel seeks to address the issue of “non-traditional/marginalized” philosophies and education, particularly those that might be categorized as Inter-American. Each of our panelists demonstrates the unique contribution of an Inter-American approach to philosophical texts/manuals, positive classroom outcomes, and critiques of dominant educational paradigms. As such, this panel develops a shared meta-thesis: if we wish students at all levels to see themselves as creators and producers of knowledge, then an Inter-American philosophical intervention is critical to current philosophical education practices.

To this end, our first panelist explains the necessity of widening our notion of who might count as an American philosopher in her introduction to a reader she has edited on American Philosophy. The standard of the European White male as a legitimate philosopher predominates both philosophy in general as well as Classical American Philosophy. Philosophers in the American Philosophy tradition have failed to acknowledge that the term “American” connotes a continent and this continent’s peoples. This panelist explains how the word “American” does not exclusively mean US American. The very fact that we must emphasize Inter-American to mean philosophy from all of the Americas instead of simply saying “American Philosophy” supports the fact that in the American Philosophy tradition the term “American” has been used exclusively to mean philosophy and philosophers from the US.

Our second panelist provides findings from a qualitative study on the factors that allow Latino and Latina college students on the U.S.-Mexico border to persist and succeed in philosophy education. This is important because students of color continue to be severely underrepresented in academic philosophy and in the academic world as a whole. The findings from this study provide insights into the role of philosophy as a critical tool for transformation through engagement with social struggles around intersectional identities in philosophy education. These findings are significant because they can help make philosophy education more inclusive and diverse.

Finally, our third panelist discusses the educational conditions of the American academy, and speaks to the underlying philosophical and pedagogical methodologies utilized in higher education. In this context, the paper addresses the dominance of Western/Eurocentric paradigms and the production (and reproduction) of knowledge, and raises the question of how increases in “non-traditional/marginalized” philosophies can be meaningful under this dominant paradigmatic condition. It argues that a meaningful intervention of this dominant paradigm in philosophical education is needed especially in the recovery and reproduction of “non-traditional” philosophies. It accomplishes this task by offering an Inter-American, anti-colonial justification for this kind of intervention, ultimately offering justification and support to the interventions proposed by our first two panelists.