My Journey in Philosophy: Highlights

Abstract

 This autobiographical essay addresses the author’s evolution as a Latin American/Latina philosopher in the United States, focusing on a shift of perspectives she undertook through the 1970s and ’80s as she gradually became more engaged with her own Latin American cultural roots. She traces the complex conditions that allowed her to pursue a systematic interest in Latin American philosophy and to defend the philosophical methodologies needed to sustain it (considered marginal to mainstream philosophy). Showing how philosophical dialogue across cultures can break down at times but also how it can overcome its ruptures, she argues that thinking critically at the limits means enacting the possibility of listening to underrepresented or ›new‹ speakers. She claims that this involves the ability to cross the gap between the conventional and the new and that a far richer philosophical life is possible when full attention is given to the voices of women,