PUBLICATIONS
a) Journal Articles (with links to pdfs)
(16) "Paulo Freire and Jorge Portilla on the Oppressed as the Agents of Liberation"
forthcoming, Res Philosophica
(15) “Credible Theological Encroachment a la Clemente de Jesus Munguia”
forthcoming, Faith and Philosophy
(14) “Leibniz on the Principle of the Best, Optimism, and Divine Freedom”
forthcoming, Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy
(13) “An Existentialist Response to the Problem of Evil a la Jorge Portilla”
forthcoming, Religious Studies
(12) “The Ethics of Ethnic Identity: Jorge Portilla versus Christine Korsgaard”
Res Philosophica, 102.2: 1-24, April 2025.
(11) "Carlos Vaz Ferreira on Intellectual Flourishing as Intellectual Liberation."
British Journal for the History of Philosophy, 32.6: 1374-1395, 2024.
(10) "Leibniz on Innocent Individual Concepts and Metaphysical Contingency."
History of Philosophy Quarterly, 41.1: 73-94, 2024.
(9) “Emilio Uranga and Jorge Portilla on Accidentality as a Decolonial Tool.”
Res Philosophica, 101.1: 55-80, January 2024.
(8) “Jorge Portilla on Philosophy and Agential Liberation.”
The Southern Journal of Philosophy, 00:1-17, November 2023.
(7) “Decolonizing the Mind and Authentic Self-Creation a la Jorge Portilla.”
2022 APA Essay Prize in Latin American Thought (honorable mention).
APA Studies on Hispanic/Latino Issues in Philosophy, 22.2: 5-10, Spring 2023.
(6) “Leibniz on Free and Responsible Wrongdoing.” British Journal for the History of
Philosophy, 31.1: 23-43, 2022.
(5) “Carlos Vaz Ferreira on Freedom and Determinism.”
Res Philosophica, 99.4: 377-402, October 2022.
(4) “Leibniz on Agential Contingency and Inclining but not Necessitating Reasons.”
Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 52.2: 149-164, February 2022.
(3) “Leibniz on Agential Contingency and Explanation of Rational Action.”
Studia Leibnitiana, 51.1: 76-98, 2019.
(2) “Leibniz, a Friend of Molinism.” Res Philosophica, special issue
New Frontiers in Philosophy of Religion, 95.3: 397-420, July 2018.
(1) “Libertarianism, Moral Character, and Alternative Possibilities in Thomas Reid.”
History of Philosophy Quarterly, 35.1: 59-75, January 2018.
b) Book Reviews
“Justin J. Daeley, Why God Must Do What is Best: A Philosophical Investigation of Theistic
Optimism.” The Leibniz Review, 32: 159-165, 2022.
c) Other Publications
“Mi Experiencia.” ¿Qué Pasa, OSU? Spring 2007 edition. In this university magazine
article, I relate my experience as a minority student in a U.S. university.
WORK IN PROGRESS
a) Under Review or Revise and Resubmit
"Existential Care of the Self a la Jorge Portilla"
“Leibniz on the PSR as a Regulative Principle of Rational Inquiry”
“Samuel Clarke on Moral Necessity and Divine Freedom”
“Paolo Freire and Jorge Portilla on the Oppressed as the Agents of Liberation”
“Augusto Salazar Bondy on Love as Positive Liberation”
b) Earlier Stages of Development
“Authentically Owning One’s Ethnic Identity a la Jorge Portilla”
“Leopoldo Zea on the Emergence of the Marginalized”
"Samuel Clarke on the Virtue of Faith"
Research Statement
I specialize in Early Modern philosophy, Latin American philosophy, Philosophy of Religion, and Social and Political philosophy, though my research in the latter two fields is often subordinated to my research in the former two fields. One of my research foci is Leibniz’s interrelated views on freedom, agency, responsibility, and metaphysics of modality. In Latin American philosophy, my research tends to revolve around freedom, liberation, and authenticity, and the extent to which these notions are influenced by, or themselves influence, notions of race and ethnic identity. I am particularly interested in the way these notions emerge in the early and middle parts of the twentieth century, when much of Latin American philosophy was re-defining itself independently of, and often in explicit opposition to, the philosophical currents originating in Europe which had dominated Latin American thinking until then.
In “Leibniz on Agential Contingency and Inclining but not Necessitating Reasons,” (2022, Canadian Journal of Philosophy) I argue for a novel interpretation of Leibniz’s account of contingency as a condition for freedom. In sum, a choice is agentially contingent when it results from deliberation regarding several possible courses of action, each of which the agent could have brought about had she concluded that it was best. I use this account to make sense of Leibniz’s claims that an action is contingent because reasons for action merely incline and do not necessitate that action. In “Leibniz on Agential Contingency and Explanation of Rational Action,” (2019, Studia Leibnitiana) I argue that agential contingency enables Leibniz to make sense of the possible exercise of actually unexercised agential powers, even given several strong Leibnizian commitments regarding explanation of rational action and causal determinism. In “Leibniz on Free and Responsible Wrongdoing” (2022, British Journal for the History of Philosophy) I use agential contingency to make sense of Leibniz’s commitment to indirect powers that agents have over their future actions, habits, and passions; I argue that these indirect powers enable Leibniz to make sense of agents’ responsibility even in cases in which there are factors present that are otherwise exculpatory or undermining of moral agency and freedom. Part of my research project includes developing the ideas in these papers into a book on Leibniz’s conception of agential contingency and its contribution to agency and moral responsibility.
In “Leibniz, a Friend of Molinism,” (2018, Res Philosophica) I argue that Leibniz endorses the core tenets of Molinism and, furthermore, that he also utilizes these tenets for the same theoretical purposes as Molinists. In “Neither Necessitarianism nor Sheer Will: Leibniz on Divine Freedom and Wisdom,” (under review) I develop my interpretation of Leibniz as a friend of Molinism to carve a conception of divine freedom that lies between necessitarianism (the view that everything actual is metaphysically necessary) and what I call the ‘sheer will’ view (the view that God’s will is the fundamental explanation for why created things are the way they are). According to this middle position, it is morally necessary, but metaphysically contingent, for God to do what is best. In “Leibniz on Innocent Individual Concepts and Metaphysical Contingency,” (under review) I present a novel way of understanding Leibniz’s views on individual concepts and metaphysics of modality that allows for metaphysical contingency. The resulting modal metaphysics have remarkable similarities to Molinism. In “Leibniz on the PSR as a Regulative Principle of Rational Inquiry,” (under review) I argue that Leibniz’s principle of sufficient reason (PSR) is best understood as a philosophical stance that settles permissible and impermissible moves in the game of rational inquiry into a fundamentally intelligible reality. I argue that Leibniz’s modal metaphysics itself emerges from the type of rational inquiry shaped by Leibniz’s PSR. Part of my research project is to bring together the ideas in these articles and elaborate them into a second book on Leibniz’s views on divine providence and the metaphysics of modality.
I have several other projects on Leibniz’s thought at various stages of development, but my research interests in the Early Modern period extend beyond Leibniz. For example, in “Libertarianism, Moral Character, and Alternative Possibilities in Thomas Reid” (2018, History of Philosophy Quarterly) I use Reid as a case study to understand how best to resolve an apparent tension 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 seems to imply that God always does the morally best, and thus it appears that there are no other possible alternatives open to God. I argue that Reid has the theoretical tools to retain a robust account of libertarian freedom without compromising a robust account of perfectly formed characters. In sum, it is necessary that agents with fully formed characters always act in character (read de dicto), but it is possible that agents with fully formed characters act out of character (read de re). The former claim captures the robustness of perfectly formed characters and the latter captures the robustness of libertarian freedom, I argue.
I am also interested in several other topics within philosophy of religion. For example, in “Credible Theological Encroachment a la Clemente de Jesus Munguia” (under review) I call a ‘faith-reason epistemic pairing’ a relatively unified cluster of views about how to epistemically navigate potential conflicts between faith and reason. The main question for this paper is about how to assess the epistemic credentials of competing faith-reason epistemic pairings. I propose a criterion: one reason for thinking that a particular faith-reason epistemic pairing is credible is that it is a worthy object of choice for a recognizably worship-worthy God. I argue that this criterion can elucidate the distinction between cases of credible theological encroachment upon philosophical inquiry and dogmatic attempts to curb one’s reason to dubiously sidestep potentially devastating objections to one’s faith coming from one’s reason. I rely on the thought of early 19th century Mexican Catholic Bishop Clemente de Jesus Munguia (1810-1868) as a case study to illustrate the plausibility of this criterion.
Furthermore, I am currently working on the way in which freedom, liberation, and authenticity emerge in the thought of Mexican philosopher Jorge Portilla (1918-1963) and Uruguayan philosopher Carlos Vaz Ferreira (1872-1958). In “Decolonizing the Mind and Authentic Self-Creation a la Jorge Portilla” (2023 APA Studies on Latino/Hispanic Issues in Philosophy), I sketch an answer to questions like: 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. I argue that Portilla’s account of authentic self-creation allows for a kind of decolonization that makes it conceptually possible for Latin Americans to be Catholics, feminists, or democratic socialists in an authentic fashion. Authentic decolonization of the mind, I argue, can be understood as a particular kind of authentic self-creation: one that is appropriately sensitive to the colonial history of the identities freely chosen by the agent. In “Jorge Portilla on Philosophy and Agential Liberation,” (forthcoming, The Southern Journal of Philosophy) I present an interpretation of Portilla’s account of the nature of liberation. I argue that, for Portilla, liberation involves two central elements: i) a type of flourishing of agency central to human flourishing which essentially involves taking values seriously in acting, and ii) an increase in the reach of intentional action that I describe as an expansion in the arena of human agency. In “Emilio Uranga and Jorge Portilla on Accidentality as a Decolonial Tool,” (forthcoming, Res Philosophica) I present Uranga’s philosophy of accidentality. Someone is in a state of accidentality if she does not find herself 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 life trajectories are viable, which actions are praiseworthy, which character traits are admirable, etc. I argue that Uranga’s and Portilla’s accounts of accidentality can be understood as decolonial tools and that this makes them philosophically attractive. One of my research goals is to write a book in which I develop the ideas defended in these papers. The main goal of this book is to bring Portilla’s thought into conversation with contemporary discussions on the nature of decolonization.
In “Carlos Vaz Ferreira on Freedom and Determinism,” (2022, Res Philosophica) I present my interpretation of Vaz Ferreira’s distinctive ideas regarding the nature of freedom and its relation to casual determinism. For Vaz Ferreira 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. These are conceptually different problems. As Vaz Ferreira sees it, failing to keep these problems apart gives rise to merely apparent but unreal puzzles pertaining to the nature of freedom and its relation to determinism. In “Carlos Vaz Ferreira on Intellectual Flourishing as Intellectual Liberation” (under review) 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 interesting, and radical, views on the nature of language signification and thus on human’s ability to accurately describe and know reality, for failing to keep these linguistic limitations in mind, Vaz Ferreira argues, is a central way for language to enslave humans to confused thinking and thus prevent their intellectual flourishing.
Within Latin American philosophy, my short-term research plan involves further investigation into the ways in which freedom, liberation, and authenticity emerge in the thought of both Portilla and Vaz Ferreira. My long-term research plan in this field includes delving into the way these ideas emerge in other fascinating Latin American figures like Luis Villoro, Leopoldo Zea, Alejandro Korn, and other key philosophers of the formative early and middle parts of the twentieth century.