Manuel Vargas, Professor, Department of Philosophy, UCSD

Speaker Bio: Manuel Vargas is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of California San Diego. One facet of his research focuses on the overlap of moral and psychological issues concerning human agency and freedom. A second facet concerns the history of philosophy in Mexico, and a third focuses on issues in contemporary Latina/o/x/e philosophy. Vargas is the author of the forthcoming Mexican Philosophy (OUP), which showcases notable episodes in the history of philosophy in Mexico. He is also the author of Building Better Beings: A Theory of Moral Responsibility (OUP, 2013), which won the American Philosophical Association’s Book Prize in 2015. From 2019-2021, Vargas and Santiago Amaya (U. de los Andes), co-directed a $1.2 million project funded by the John Templeton Foundation to foster philosophical work on free will, agency, and responsibility in Latin America. With Clinton Tolley (UC San Diego), he directs the Mexican Philosophy Lab at UC San Diego. http://vargasphilosophy.com/

Abstract: A variety of philosophers and social theorists have thought that Latinxs don’t fit the usual identity categories in the United States. The category doesn’t seem like a racial category, because its members can be members of any racial group. It also doesn’t seem especially promising as an ethnic category, because it is unclear that there is sufficient cultural overlap amongst its members to constitute an ethnic group. Various other proposals—ethnorace, historical families, affordances, and so on—all seem to face their own problems. There is a way to sidestep many of the familiar challenges to the category, but it comes at the cost of doing both more and less than we might hope for a social identity category. Even so, this shows us something important about the limits and significance of such categories.