Juan Carlos Gonzalez

[Winner of the 2025 APA Essay Prize in Latin American Thought.] In this paper, I explain why influential early 20th century Mexican philosopher Antonio Caso’s effort to inaugurate aesthetics in Mexico represents a watershed moment in the history of aesthetics. I chart the evolution of Caso’s understanding of aesthetics throughout his career, detail the role it plays in his systematic philosophy, and discuss how philosophers today have much to gain from engaging with his aesthetics. In Section 1, I demonstrate that in his early career, Caso advances an anti-individualist aesthetics well ahead of its time. In Section 2, I discuss the theory of aesthetic disinterest developed in the 1925 Principios de estética, articulating its contribution to Caso’s philosophical system and to the history of aesthetics. In Section 3, I turn to the final edition of the Existencia, where Caso argues that, without the ability to recognize aesthetic value, human beings cannot recognize or realize moral value.

[Winner of the 2024 Review of Metaphysics dissertation essay contest.] In the Critique of the Power of Judgment—Kant’s seminal work on teleology—Kant never once mentions the philosopher who is widely credited with inventing teleology, namely, Aristotle. To make matters worse, when Kant does survey and critique available views on natural teleology throughout the history of philosophy, he seems to completely overlook Aristotle’s teleology. While this may lead us to surmise that Kant was either indifferent towards or ignorant of Aristotle’s teleology, the author argues that it is possible to read Kant as advancing a version of Aristotle’s natural teleology—a version, of course, that respects the limits drawn by Kant’s transcendental philosophy. Moreover, our investigation into Kant’s Aristotelianism reveals a new way of explaining the organism without rendering it a convenient fiction or dogmatically asserting its reality. In the end, our exercise of situating Aristotle in Kant’s account of natural teleology reveals that omission is sometimes a high form of intellectual flattery.

A prominent post-Kantian critique of Kant contends that Kant’s Critical philosophy is defensible only if his account of mental activity is grounded in life, subsequently denying that Kant grounds mental activities in life. I call this critique the inorganicism challenge. In what follows, I show that this challenge is neither extraneous nor vague, but must be taken seriously. I also show that Kant has the resources to rebut this challenge. In the first section, I contextualize the inorganicism challenge by demonstrating that it stems from a long line of (what I call) anti-realist readings of Kant’s doctrine of purposiveness. In the second section, I illustrate how anti-realist views have animated inorganicist challengers. In the third section, I explain that Kant actually does reserve a deep role for life in his theory of mind.

I reconstruct 20th-century Mexican philosopher José Vasconcelos’s answers to two important aesthetic-political questions: (1) Can aesthetic judgments bind community? and (2) Can aesthetic judgments drive political, social, and cultural change? My objectives are twofold: one, to show that Vasconcelos’s responses make original contributions to an important aesthetic-political tradition that begins with Kant, and two, to offer key ideas from Vasconcelos’s aesthetics to a wider audience, as an invitation to engage with his work in their research and teaching. In section I, I argue that Kant’s remarks suggest that aesthetic judgments bind the community. In section II, I explain that Kant sometimes appears to suggest that aesthetic judgments promote political, social, and cultural change. Section III discusses two bridge figures—Schiller and Arendt—that help us better understand how Kantian aesthetics binds community and serves political purposes. In section IV, I argue that Vasconcelos aligns with the Kantian tradition exemplified by Schiller and Arendt when developing a plan for aesthetically-guided social and political progress. I also show that, during his time in various positions of power in the Mexican government, Vasconcelos brought ideas from the Kantian tradition to life. I conclude by reflecting on how Vasconcelos reveals new possibilities for the Kantian tradition.

In this paper, I defend a non-mechanistic interpretation of Kant's philosophy of nature. My interpretation contradicts the robust tradition of reading Kant as a mechanist about nature – or as someone who endorses the view that we can know the internally purposive causality characteristic of organisms has no place in nature. By attending closely to Kant's remarks about the possibility of internal purposiveness in nature and to key premises from Kant's arguments in the Antinomy of Teleological Judgment, we shall see that it is not only plausible, but preferable, to believe that internally purposive things (i.e., organisms) exist in nature. Making room for such a belief leaves Kant with a philosophy of nature that simultaneously aligns with and surpasses the philosophies of nature offered up by his Early Modern predecessors.

[Recipient of the 2024 Inter-American Philosophy Award] Philosophers have recently debated whether the social identity category "Latinx" picks out a race (Alcoff 2006), an ethnicity (Gracia 2008), or something else altogether (Arango and Burgos 2021). Rather than defending one or several of these ways of understanding US Latinx as a political or social group, my paper focuses on the personal social identity turmoil young US Latinx people feel and explores the history of inter-American thought to seek a remedy for it. Three prominent American philosophers – José Martí, Alain Locke, and Emilio Uranga – combine to teach us that, while the US Latinx strives for belonging, they find themselves in a situation of unbelonging. The tension that results from the desire to belong but the reality of unbelonging produces a deep-seated anxiety that has come to characterize the US Latinx condition. I suggest that an effective tool for coping with this anxiety, affirming our identity, and building community is the activity of doing inter-American, Latin American, and Latinx Philosophy.

My dissertation defends a non-mechanistic interpretation of Kant’s philosophy of nature. Inspired by the picture of nature in the Critique of Pure Reason and Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science, most readers align Kant with Early Modern mechanists, who claim that we can know that the internally purposive form of causality characteristic of organisms has no place in nature. To these mechanistic readers, Kant banishes internal purposiveness from nature. To moderate mechanistic interpreters, because we cannot know whether there are internally purposive things in nature and we can demonstrate that mechanism applies to nature, Kant pushes us to believe that any seemingly internally purposive natural products will eventually be explained in mechanistic terms. To strong mechanistic interpreters, Kant gives us the tools to know that there is no room for the special kind of teleology organisms exhibit in nature. My non-mechanistic interpretation rejects this trend by arguing that Kant urges us to believe that the internally purposive activity characteristic of organisms exists in nature. Belief in this context is a firm, positive, and voluntary attitude that aligns with and serves a subject’s interests and ends, and that has implications for the subject’s rational action, assertion, and deliberation. Kant’s stated goal in the third Critique is to bridge the gulf between freedom and nature. My non-mechanistic interpretation offers a new account of how Kant promises to construct this bridge.

In this article, I argue that, contrary to scholarly consensus, Antonio Caso draws inspiration from important principles and ideas from Kant’s philosophy in his critique of positivism. I first examine the prima facie textual reasons why someone might believe that Caso and Kant are philosophical enemies. To contradict this notion, I proceed by noting and developing three core ideas that the two share in common. First, Caso and Kant are both ardent critics of dogmatic philosophizing. Second, both Caso and Kant carve out special room for intuition in their respective accounts of cognition, resisting the idea that the understanding has a more prominent role in the formation of knowledge. Third, Kant’s doctrine of aesthetic judgment paves the way for Caso’s de-intellectualized aesthetics. In the end, we see that Kant and Caso are closer to being philosophical friends than enemies.

Typically, existentialist analyses of “America” have been limited to North America (more specifically, the United States). I argue that developing an adequate framework for existentially analyzing America requires a turn to Mexican existentialism. In Emilio Uranga’s and Jorge Portilla’s writings, we discover new conceptual tools for understanding Americanness as such. These thinkers help us imagine an account of American being that does not restrict itself to the United States by using the concepts of existentialism to describe the crises their neighbors to the north as well as they themselves face. American existence has been historically characterized by a convergence (oftentimes clash) of disparate races, ethnicities, languages, cultures, religions, and identities. As history unfolded, this convergence led to various existential crises across the Americas. Whereas the US American way of life is marred by a blustering, naïve, and purposeless misuse of freedom that disregards the other, the existential crisis the Mexican lives is characterized by “accidentality” and “zozobra.” Despite these important differences, all existentialists, and the Mexican existentialists of the Hyperion Group especially, remind us that there is a common way to overcome the various existential crises plaguing the Americas, and that is to exercise freedom in a purposeful, communally conscious manner.