Sergio A. Gallegos-Ordorica

I compare a 1689 ballad by the Mexican Hieronymite nun Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, “Let Us Pretend I am Happy,” with David Hume’s 1742 essay, “The Sceptic.” I argue that each composition conveys several competing messages. At the surface layer, both compositions employ skeptical reasoning to argue against the usefulness of learning for attaining happiness. They also invite ironic readings on which learning is a primary source of joy – a point also emphasized by Sor Juana’s defenses of women’s right to study. Ultimately, I argue, both Sor Juana and Hume hold an intermediary position between the surface-layer pessimism and ironic optimism. They express this middle position using a literary device I call ‘layered irony.’ Comparing the two compositions reveals that layered irony is a fitting device for producing the middle position, for critiquing skepticism, and for increasing philosophy’s efficacy in its traditional function as a kind of therapy.

I argue that, in Plato’s Laws, demotic virtues (δημόσιαι ἀρεταί, 968a2) are the virtues that non-divine beings can attain. I consider two related questions: what demotic virtues are and how they relate to divine virtue. According to my interpretation, demotic virtues are an attainable – but unreliable – type of virtue that non-divine beings can improve through knowledge. These virtues are not perfect; only divine beings possess perfect virtue. However, this does not mean that perfect virtue plays no part in the ethical lives of non-divine beings. It serves as a “regulative ideal” for everyone who is not a god.

Marie de Gournay and Anton Wilhelm Amo, though thinking and writing in different social contexts, each offer an account of prejudice which bears a deep philosophical resonance to that of the other. This resonance is striking and mutually illuminating: Gournay and Amo develop a view of prejudice as a kind of epistemic and moral viciousness that damages both the prejudicial person and their socio-epistemic neighbors. Their accounts highlight how agents are rightly held responsible for prejudice, as it is the agents' epistemic negligence and moral failure that allows prejudice to take hold. As such, their view offers a balance between a critical examination of individuals and an acknowledgement of the deep sociality that pervades the epistemic domain.