Jorge J. E. Gracia

THE AUDIENCE IS THE REAL or imaginary group of persons who are in fact acquainted, could be acquainted, or are meant to be acquainted with a given text. Etymologically, the term "audience" refers to a group of listeners. This meaning of the term goes back to a time when the primary form of acquaintance with the work of an author was through the spoken word. From the invention of the printing press, however, until the time when the use of the radio became widespread, written texts were the primary way of learning about an author's work. Although contemporary media have changed this to a certain extent, in science and the humanities it is still true that the audience for an author's work consists largely of readers. For my present purposes, the distinction between readers and listeners is immaterial and, hence, I often refer to an audience as a group of readers, although what I say about it will apply, mutatis mutandis, to listeners as well.

Despite predictions that Hispanics will soon outnumber all other minority groups combined in the United States, philosophy has remained indifferent to the growing Hispanic population. This paper offers several hypotheses why this is the case, arguing that Hispanics and Hispanic thought are perceived as unphilosophical (or only narrowly philosophical) and are thus perceived as ill-suited for academia and academic discussions in the United States. The author concludes by proposing strategies for overcoming this marginalization of Hispanics and Hispanic philosophy.

__Forging People __explores the way in which Hispanic American thinkers in Latin America and Latino/a philosophers in the United States have posed and thought about questions of race, ethnicity, and nationality, and how they have interpreted the most significant racial and ethnic labels used in Hispanic America in connection with issues of rights, nationalism, power, and identity. Following the first introductory chapter, each of the essays addresses one or more influential thinkers, ranging from Bartolomé de Las Casas on race and the rights of Amerindians; to Simon Bolívar's struggle with questions of how to forge a nation from disparate populations; to modern and contemporary thinkers on issues of race, unity, assimilation, and diversity. Each essay carefully and clearly presents the views of key authors in their historical and philosophical context and provides brief biographical sketches and reading lists, as aids to students and other readers. “Latin American philosophy has a long history of engagement with issues of race, ethnicity, and nationality. To date, however, there has been no volume that focused on the contributions of the major figures in the Latin American tradition, to illustrate their connections, and to illuminate the context in which much of their work occurred. This volume fills that gap and takes an important step in remedying this shortcoming in the existing philosophical literature, and also in the literature of related fields such as Latin American studies, ethnic studies, and the cross-disciplinary work of race, ethnicity, and nationality.” —_Manuel Vargas, University of San Francisco _

This article claims that communication within the same culture in the present and with the past and communication across cultures pose serious methodological challenges for philosophers. These challenges are particularly obvious when we engage in comparative philosophy between East and West. However, if (1) we understand philosophy as a discipline involved in problem solving, and (2) we use the Framework Approach advocated in this article, such communication does not seem impossible. Of course, this approach may not help us with the challenges posed by the kind of philosophy that does not deal with problems.

This article discusses Suárez''s views concerning the transcendentals, that is, being and those attributes of it that extend to everything. In particular it explores Suárez''s notion of transcendentality and the way in which he conceived the transcendental attributes of being are related to it. It makes two claims: First, that Suárez has an intensional, rather than an extensional understanding of transcendentality; and, second, that Suárez''s understanding of truth and goodness, as expressing real extrinsic denominations based on real relations, appears to contain an inconsistency.