Mendieta Joins Penn State Philosophy Faculty

The Department of Philosophy at Penn State is happy to announce that Professor Eduardo Mendieta will join our faculty this summer.

Prof. Mendieta recently finished a monograph titled The Philosophical Animal: On Zoopoetics and Interspecies Cosmopolitanism, which is forthcoming with SUNY Press. He is already at work on what he considers to be a prequel titled, Philosophy’s War: Nomos, Polemos, Topos. Most immediately, however, he is editing his essays on the critical philosophy of race and will gather them under the title of Technologies of the Racist Self.

He is also editing a couple of anthologies on the history of Latin American philosophy and its most recent developments.

Once these books are complete, he plans to pursue two other projects. One has to do with Latin American cities, which takes up work on megaurbanization, megaslums, and the Anthropocene he has undertaken over the last couple of years. He has picked some six or seven Latin American cities to exemplify what he call the Latin American Urban Genius.

The second project, which is tentatively titled Philosophy’s Workshop, has to do with what he has called philosophy’s paralipomena. The aim is to study, profile, and unearth the many ways in which philosophy is produced, crafted, thought, written, communicated, and confessed: letters, dialogues, voice, diaries/autobiographies, lectures, and the philosopher’s body (female, male, racialized, lesbian, gay, transgender, bisexual, disabled, ugly, etc). The aim is to develop a genealogy of the production of philosophy that is attentive to its material spaces of production. His guiding philosophical idea is that philosophy takes place in and through bodies that are always located in institutional spaces, which affect its imaginary.