Research
I work on social ontology and philosophy of the social sciences. Since I am committed to naturalized approaches to philosophy, my work also intersects with general philosophy of science and cognitive sciences. Given my political commitments, my research has a feminist and decolonial approach. I am mainly interested in the categorization of human beings and how this interacts with context, cognition, and identity. Particularly, I am interested in the relationship between the self and the natural or social kinds we are members of.
Although very diverse, my interests intersect in the topics of classifications and the self. I'm also interested in philosophical approaches to Latin American realities, such as violence.
Publications
Nakaya-Perez, I. (2022). Parallel Debates: A Methodological Proposal. Resistances. Journal of the Philosophy of History, 3(6), e21096. https://doi.org/10.46652/resistances.v3i6.96
Talks
2024
“A Self Where All Selves Fit”, American Association for Mexican Philosophers (AAMP) 13th Annual Conference, UC Davis, California, USA.
“The Ontology of Ourselves”, Latinx Philosophy Conference, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, New York, USA.
"Ser Violento: Violence and the Constitution of the Self", Invited Symposium: Violence/Violencia (Bilingual Session), APA Pacific Meeting.
2023
"A Self Where all Selves Fit" [in Spanish], Social Categories: a New Map of Latin America's Social Ontology at Pontificia Universidad Javeriana, Colombia.
“Reconsidering Taxonomies: A Decolonial View of Scientific Classification”, 17th International Congress on Logic, Methodology and Philosophy of Science and Technology in Buenos Aires.
“Reconsidering Taxonomies: A Decolonial View of Scientific Classification”, International Society for the History Philosophy and Social Studies of Biology biennial meeting at the University of Toronto.
“Does Autonomy Shame Exist?”, Annual Conference of Long Island Philosophical Society [LIPS] at Saint John's University.
2021
“Technology and Science: The Case of Psychiatry” [In Spanish], XX International Congress of the Mexican Philosophical Association.
“Moral Responsibility in non-ideal agents” [In Spanish], Affiliate Students Seminar at UNAM’s Institute for Philosophy Research.
2020
“What is a Hybrid Kind? The Case of Mental Illness” [In Spanish], Affiliate Students Seminar at UNAM’s Institute for Philosophy Research.
Work in progress
You can ask for a draft of any of these four papers - Not for circulation
[QP] Decolonizing Taxonomies: Towards a Disorganization of the Order
Taxonomies produce many different effects, including relief, anger, anxiety, oppression, and rebelion. As a consequence, some have opposed to taxonomies. However, it is not clear exactly what their arguments hold and what are they about: are they about taxonomies in general? The history attached to them? Some of their features? Or maybe their consequences? I try to give one answer to these questions. Specifically, I engage with the question of whether taxonomies are oppressive. In order to do that, I analyze different kinds of arguments against taxonomies and classifications in general. This question arises usually in the context of decolonial philosophy and I focus on arguments offered in this tradition.
2. Hybrid Kinds: The Case of Mental Illness
Social ontology has assumed a distinction between social and natural kinds. On the basis of this distinction, a common discussion is whether a certain human kind - race or gender, for instance - is a social or a natural kind. In this paper, I propose that there are kinds that are neither natural nor social, but are what I call hybrid kinds. Taking the literature on social ontology and philosophy of psychiatry into account, I argue that one such example is mental illness and I focus on the psychiatric category of schizophrenia.
3. Does Autonomous Shame Exist?
In ‘On Shamelessness’ (2010), Michell Mason distinguishes between an autonomous and a heteronomous shame. By doing this, she challenges the standard conception of shame according to which shame is always heteronomous since it implies another view. My objective in this paper is to challenge the division between autonomous and heteronomous shame, as was proposed by Mason (2010), and by doing so, to question whether an autonomous shame is possible. I defend that the distinction between autonomous and heteronomous shame may be conserved but, for that, we need to think of alternative views of what autonomy is.
Incipient Projects
I am interested in how belonging to different categories affects the way we think, act, and relate to others. In particular, I am interested in the ontology of borderline, multiple and hybrid identities. I draw from decolonial frameworks to account for them.
From a normative point of view, I am interested in the agency and moral responsibility of those agents who are not unified or who do not fall into traditional frameworks of practical rationality. I focus on non-reflexive theories of moral responsibility, especially theories of self-expression, and on contextualist frameworks of action theory.
I am also interested in social categories such as gender and class, but my research focuses on experiences that question the limits of these. I seek to answer questions such as: What is the relationship between gender and context? Is it possible to have multiple gender identities? What kind of factor determines our belonging to a social class? How should the identity of people experiencing social mobility be understood?
From a political perspective, I am interested in the tension between the positive and negative aspects of belonging to a social group. For example, I am interested in gender as an important part of our identity and gender as an important factor in the oppression of some people. I seek to explore the possibility of a gender abolitionism allied with queer struggles. I am also interested in ways to resist cultural, political, and scientific classifications.
Finally, I think that the study of psychiatry as a discipline can give us essential information for the study of classificatory practices. On the one hand, it has a scientific status; on the other hand, in psychiatric knowledge, non-epistemic values play a role as in no other science. As parallel projects, I am interested in the notion of cure and in the difference between mental illness and other categories such as race or gender.