Five Books of Contemporary Philosophy made in Mexico you ought to read right now!

Part I: Those already available in English

  1. Poverty: A Philosophical Approach by Paulette Dieterlen
    A philosophical evaluation, based both on concrete observations and theoretical arguments, of the difficult interactions between poverty and public policy. In Dieterlen’s approach, poverty is both a political problem, for it involves exclusion and disenfranchisement, and an ethical problem in so far as it involves the loss of self esteem, respect and autonomy.
  2. Roads to Reference by Mario Gomez Torrente
    I have always admired Mario’s capacity of developing air-tight arguments and this ability is in high display in this book. At a surface level, the topic is reference and reference fixing, but a closer read revels an insightful approach to perennial questions on the relation between mind, language and world. Those who have had the pleasure to know Gómez-Torrente in person know of his pitch dark wit and humor and I only wished there was more of it here, but that is my only caveat in recommending this great book.
  3. An Introduction to the Philosophy of Logic by Luis Estrada and  Daniel Cohnitz 
    A great introductory textbook to current debates in the philosophy of logic. I am a big fan of Estrada’s approach to logic as philosophy and I welcome his and his co-author’s way of presenting these topics as philosophical problems first and technical problems second, if at all.
  4. Abductive Reasoning by Atocha Aliseda
    In just a few years, this book has become a mandatory reference in the study of abductive reasoning. Just as its subtitle – “Logical Investigations into Discovery and Explanation” – indicates, in it Aliseda develops formal logical tools to account for the inferential apsects of (mostly scientific) discovery and explanation, but also progress and belief revision.
  5. Open Compositionality by Eduardo García Ramírez
    Subtitled “Toward a New Methodology of Language”, it present a bold proposal to re-engineer our philosophical conception of language from a naturalistic standpoint. Just like Gómez-Torrente’s book above, Open Compositionality is part of a recent trend (which includes Maite Ezcurdia’s forthcoming posthumous book on semantic structure, and my recent book Falibilidad y Normatividad) of updating a broadly Wittgensteinean approach to language as a tool. In García-Ramírez proposal,  natural languages are tools for the trans-modular interaction among distinct areas of human cognition. Highly provocative.

Yes, this is very biased, since it contains only my colleagues at the National University’s Institute for Research in Philosophy, so I hope to offer a broader list soon. In the meanwhile, I am open to read about your own recommendations

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.