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176Carlos Vaz Ferreira on intellectual flourishing as intellectual liberationBritish Journal for the History of Philosophy 1-22. 2024.I argue for a substantive interpretation of Carlos Vaz Ferreira’s account of intellectual flourishing as intellectual liberation. For Vaz Ferreira, I argue, there is an inescapable master-slave dynamic between language and language users, so that flourishing intellectually essentially involves a type of mastery of language that frees up thinking from enslaving linguistic/conceptual confusions and thus facilitates the acquisition of truth. Central to this project are Vaz Ferreira’s most interesti…Read more
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188Leibniz on Innocent Individual Concepts and Metaphysical ContingencyHistory of Philosophy Quarterly 41 (1): 73-94. 2024.Leibniz claims that for every possible substance S there is an individual concept that includes predicates describing everything that will ever happen to S, if S existed. Many commentators have thought that this leads Leibniz to think that all properties are had essentially, and thus that it is not metaphysically possible for substances to be otherwise than the way their individual concept has them as being. I argue against this common way of reading Leibniz’s views on the metaphysics of modal…Read more
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102Decolonizing the Mind and Authentic Self-Creation a la Jorge PortillaApa Studies on Latino/Hispanic Issues in Philosophy 22 (2): 5-10. 2023.Can a person from Latin America be a Catholic, or a feminist, or a democratic socialist in an authentic way? These identities come from Europe, and given the colonial history of Latin America, it seems reasonable to think that decolonizing the Latin American mind is a condition for its authenticity. Further, it seems reasonable to think that decolonization itself requires extirpating ideas and identities originating from the colonizers, especially those used to establish the colonial order. Thus…Read more
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184Libertarianism, Moral Character, and Alternative Possibilities in Thomas ReidHistory of Philosophy Quarterly 35 (1): 59-75. 2018.In the following paper, I wish to examine a problem for the theist libertarian. On the one hand, libertarians insist that freedom requires possible alternatives open to the agent. On the other hand, God’s perfectly formed moral character implies that He always does the morally best. Give His moral character, then, it appears that there are no possible alternatives open to God. We thus get a dilemma for the theist libertarian: either a) God is not libertarian free – because His moral character ru…Read more
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132Carlos Vaz Ferreira on Freedom and DeterminismRes Philosophica 99 (4): 377-402. 2022.Carlos Vaz Ferreira argues that the problem of freedom is conceptually distinct from the problem of causal determinism. The problem of freedom is ultimately a problem regarding the ontologically independent agency of a being, and the problem of determinism is a problem regarding explanations of events or acts in terms of the totality of their antecedent causal conditions. As Vaz Ferreira sees it, failing to keep these problems apart gives rise to merely apparent but unreal puzzles pertaining to …Read more
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155Leibniz on free and responsible wrongdoingBritish Journal for the History of Philosophy 31 (1): 23-43. 2022.According to intellectualists, the will is a rational inclination towards apprehended goodness. This conception of the will makes its acts intelligible: they are explained by (i) the nature of the will as a rational inclination, and (ii) the judgement of the intellect that moves the will. From this it follows that it is impossible for an agent to will evil as such or for its own sake. In explaining wrongdoing intellectualists cite cognitive error or the disruptive influences of the passions; the…Read more
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79Jorge Portilla on philosophy and agential liberationSouthern Journal of Philosophy. forthcoming.Jorge Portilla argues that authentic philosophical inquiry plays a liberating function. This function is that of bringing more fully to consciousness aspects of identities or ways of being‐in‐the world that have been, up until then, tacit or opaque to the agent herself to facilitate her endorsement, rejection, or modification of these identities. For Portilla, this function facilitates greater self‐mastery by increasing the range of free variations of subjectivity available to the agent, and thi…Read more
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110Leibniz on Agential Contingency and Inclining but not Necessitating ReasonsCanadian Journal of Philosophy 52 (2): 149-164. 2022.I argue for a novel interpretation of Leibniz’s conception of the kind of contingency that matters for freedom, which I label ‘agential contingency.’ In brief, an agent is free to the extent that she determines herself to do what she judges to be the best of several considered options that she could have brought about had she concluded that these options were best. I use this novel interpretation to make sense of Leibniz’s doctrine that the reasons that explain free actions are merely inclining …Read more
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143Leibniz, a Friend of MolinismRes Philosophica 95 (3): 397-420. 2018.Leibniz is commonly labeled a foe of Molinism. His rejection of robust libertarian freedom coupled with some explicit passages in which he distances himself from the doctrine of middle knowledge seem to justify this classification. In this paper, I argue that this standard view is not quite correct. I identify the two substantive tenets of Molinism. First, the connection between the conditions for free actions and these free actions is a contingent one: free actions follow contingently from thei…Read more
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64Leibniz sur la contingence agentielle et l’explication de l’action rationnelleStudia Leibnitiana 51 (1): 76. 2019.Leibniz endorses several tenets regarding explanation: (1) causes provide contrastive explanations of their effects, (2) the past and the future can be read from the present, and (3) primitive force and derivative forces drive and explain changes in monadic states. I argue that, contrary to initial appearances, these tenets do not preclude an intelligible conception of contingency in Leibniz’s system. In brief, an agent is free to the extent that she determines herself to do that which she delib…Read more
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159Emilio Uranga and Jorge Portilla on Accidentality as a Decolonial ToolRes Philosophica 101 (1): 55-80. 2024.Call ‘a substance’ a person who is at home in a relatively stable and unified sense-making framework: a social structure that to some degree specifies which categories are important for interpreting reality, which goals are worth pursing, which character traits are admirable, etc. Call ‘an accident’ a person who is not at home in one such framework. It is tempting to think that being a substance is preferable, but I present some considerations for thinking otherwise. Mexican philosophers Emilio …Read more
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Wingate UniversityRegular Faculty
Wingate, North Carolina, United States of America
Areas of Specialization
17th/18th Century Philosophy |
Philosophy of the Americas |
Areas of Interest
17th/18th Century Philosophy |
Philosophy of the Americas |