This essay offers an overview both of Alejo Carpentier’s writings and González Echevarría’s own work as a literary critic, especially as it pertains to his monograph, Alejo Carpentier: The Pilgrim at Home (1977). He traces the arc of Carpentier’s works, beginning with ¡Ecué-Yamba-Ó! and ending with El arpa y la sombra pointing to recurrent, highly original themes such as Afro-Cuban culture, classical music and jazz, colonial history, and exile, all the while noting Carpentier’s dialogue with a younger generation of Latin American writers. González Echevarría comments on the influence exerted by the concept of “the marvelous real” on Boom writers and magical realism. The essay ends by reflecting on Carpentier’s lies about his biography and points to similarities in his last novel, El arpa y la sombra (1978), between the character Christopher Columbus’s penchant to lie and his foreignness, and Carpentier himself.

El recurso del método (Reasons of State), published in 1974 by Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier, has often been analyzed along with other dictatorship novels focusing on recurring themes, such as violence, rebellion, US imperialism or the dictator’s solitude. This essay introduces a “sensory approach” arguing that Carpentier revisits the traditional hierarchy of the five senses. Thematically, the novel emphasizes the “spectacular” and panoptical dimension of the dictator’s regime; however, this visual (and aural) domination is questioned by the Marxist opposition embodied in the character of the Student. From an intertextual perspective, Carpentier’s use of quotations from Descartes paradoxically undermines the Cartesian cogito, and the protagonist’s behavior ultimately evolves toward an anti-Cartesian and anti-ocularcentric stance, as epitomized by the figure of Mayorala Elmira. Reflecting on these two dimensions of the novel from a sensorial point of view contributes to a more nuanced understanding of Carpentier’s poetics.

This chapter explores Pascal’s skeptical outlook, highlighting his innovations as well as his reliance on older, more familiar arguments. To begin with, Pascal thought that reason itself could not provide the foundations or first principles of geometry or our knowledge of space. These first principles are not only unsupportable by any proof, so that reason itself provides them no certainty, but they in turn provide materials for further uncertainty given potential infinities in space – both the largeness and smallness of space seems to have no bounds. The result is that we cannot, by appeal to reason alone, find our place within the physical universe. Similarly, and contra Descartes, no proof of God can guarantee that life is not one long dream, so belief in the external world itself cannot be supported by reason. Nor can our experience of the world prove the existence of God in any useful way. The result is that our reason and experience, operating on their own, are insufficient to establish much of anything foundational. The appeal to proofs and evidence cannot resolve other controversies of our day, either, as anyone who has tried to convince a conspiracy theorist by such methods will know.

This chapter sets the conceptual and methodological stage for the book by challenging conventional disciplinary boundaries in the history of philosophy. It argues for a broad understanding of philosophical inquiry that includes religion, literature, and lived practice. The chapter critiques the dominance of argument-based historiography, stemming from Descartes, Brucker, and the nineteenth-century research university model, which privileged metaphysics and epistemology over ethics and the art of living. It outlines a corrective vision that foregrounds genre, orality, and the performative dimensions of philosophy. Christianity is shown to be not only compatible with philosophy but also a key medium through which ancient philosophical ideas were preserved, transformed, and popularized. The chapter highlights neglected periods, especially late antiquity, and insists on the importance of reading ancient thinkers – Plato, Augustine, Paul – on their own terms and in their own genres. It advocates for a generous, contextually informed reading practice that sees philosophical ideas as part of a long conversation across centuries. Ultimately, this chapter positions the book as a work of retrieval that seeks to restore the breadth and spiritual seriousness of ancient and late ancient philosophical traditions.

I draw a contrast between what I call a ‘presentational-phenomenological model of apprehension and ultimate evidence’ – which I attribute to Descartes, Locke and Hume – and Leibniz’s ‘logical-conceptual model of apprehension and ultimate evidence’. Although there are different uses of the word ‘concept’, Leibniz’s model, in my view, illustrates the strictest and best notion of the concept of concepts: one that centrally relies on logic.

When does one genre become another? More precisely: When does the pressure that the descriptor “African” exerts on a form become sufficient for it to become another form in the global literary marketplace? This chapter underlines the role of genre theory in regulating the African continent’s literary field by scrutinizing how recent Afrofuturist fictions have intervened in critical debates about literary worlds and their genre-related meanings. The chapter interweaves discussions of three distinct strands of global theoretical thought: (1) the contestation (across decades) between the theorist Darko Suvin and the scholar/novelist China Miéville, on the definitions of science fiction and fantasy; (2) an outline of how a reconsecration of Amos Tutuola’s The Palm-Wine Drinkard worked in tandem with the writings of Wole Soyinka and Harry Garuba to reset the terms of that debate; and (3) an extended reading of how iconic twenty-first-century novels continue to “reprogram” the debate about the genres of African writing.

Aside from some attention to the notion of material falsity that Descartes cites, Francisco Suárez’s broader discussion of falsity in Metaphysical Disputations 9 has received little scholarly attention. This chapter takes a broader look, starting with Suárez’s claim that falsity, unlike truth, is properly attributed only to intellectual acts of composition and division, before focusing on the question of where false judgements or errors come from. Suárez considers several possible sources—God, an evil angel, apparent evidentness—that might make us form false judgements, but argues that none of them actually necessitate false judgements. In line with his doxastic voluntarism, Suárez concludes instead that our wills are the source of our errors. We voluntarily assent to false propositions (though in a different work, Suárez seems more open to recognizing involuntary error). The similarity between Suárez’s account of error and Descartes’ later account is easy to see.

Suárez offered a rich analysis of three types of distinction, which continued to be important in early modern philosophy: the conceptual distinction (distinction of reason), the real distinction, and the modal distinction. They are commonly understood in terms of separability, but for Suárez, separability was merely a sign of specific types of distinctions. And he argued that mutual separability is neither necessary nor sufficient for a real distinction. Furthermore, he required knowledge of actual cases of mutual separation as a sign of real distinction. This chapter examines the real distinction and modal distinction in early modern philosophy. Descartes inherited Suárez’s view that separability is a mere sign and examination of Suárez’s theory results in elegant solutions to thorny problems in Descartes’s theory of body. Finally, the notion of a mode played an important role in arguments for immaterial beings in Descartes and various other early modern philosophers, including Leibniz.

Descartes and Kant strike us as the necessary poles of a historical and philosophical process that has constantly put the deaf at the center of theories of language. While Descartes grants the deaf intellectual abilities that match other men’s, Kant pronounces in 1798 a radical verdict, asserting that the deaf from birth are bound to remain deprived of any rational capacity. Why does Kant pronounce such a verdict, at the very time when l’Abbé de l’Epée trains with success the deaf and dumb to talk in Paris, when Samuel Heinicke also succeeds through others paths in Leipzig? I shall argue that this radical shift paradoxically stems from a philosophical breakthrough within the philosophy of language, that is, the unprecedented claim that language is decisively involved in the exercise of crucial mental capacities. Because language was deemed by Cartesians to have secondary and accessory functions, its correlation with the exercise of mental capacities had to be reclaimed by anchoring the conditions of all intellectual performances in the material properties of the phonic medium. This principle provides us with a tool to rationally explain Kant’s claims in the Anthropology.

The chapter introduces Vico’s praxis epistemology and situates it within the maker’s knowledge tradition. It shows how Vico transformed the tradition into an ambitious philosophical anthropology, a philosophy of history, culture, and existence, which informs human epistemic possibilities, strengths, and limits. It is argued that this philosophy supposes and outlines an alternative, non-Cartesian version of modernity – a version based on the practical certainty that we are makers of our history and symbolic world.

This chapter aims to layout, more in detail, how Giambattista Vico weaved the different conceptual threads he gathered from such tradition to further his ambitious humanistic agenda. Vico’s philosophy of knowledge is an eclectic chimaera with many shortcomings and productive confusions. The chapter also focuses on Vico’s immediate context and intellectual references and explores four fundamental issues that surrounded and inspired the formulation of this seminal praxis epistemology: the relation between ancient and modern conceptions of knowledge; the idea that we know as makers of concepts and things; the relationship between ‘scientific’ discoveries and their conceptual criticism and the Vichian connection between the philosophy of knowledge and history as framed in his New Science.

This chapter explores the impact of science and technology’s objectifying gaze on society, Culture, and politics throughout history. It discusses how this gaze has turned the world into an object and humans into observers, diminishing moral, psychological, and political aspects. The chapter analyzes the duality of objectification, which renders man-made objects external despite embodying human values and actions. It examines the Industrial Revolution as a pivotal historical context where technology was seen as a mark of progress and an embodiment of objective Nature. Eventually, the human choices and interests behind technology were exposed, leading to the reconsideration of technologies from ethical, economic, political, and aesthetic viewpoints. The chapter also points to the ambivalence surrounding technology, including both fear and admiration, and how the disillusionment with technology has impacted the democratic epistemological framework. Additionally, it discusses the influence of philosophers-scientists like Descartes and Newton on modern dualistic cosmology, highlighting how science and technology have shaped various socio-political fields such as law, medicine, economics, and political science.

Rousseau’s Social Contract begins with breathtakingly ambitious declarations about freedom and justice. Yet the project comes to an abrupt end, and the manuscript remains a fragment. Given that Rousseau sees daring arguments to their end elsewhere, why was this particular project – one so close to the core of his thought – abandoned? On the surface, the Social Contract appears beset by contradictions, but it pursues its conclusions toward an intricate and audacious coherence, giving an account of ancient political orders to overcome what Rousseau understands as misapprehensions associated with the Enlightenment. Yet it is not the Enlightenment, but Christianity that inaugurates the break with and confusions of ancient political distinctions. An attempt to confront this origin directly shatters Rousseau’s penultimately profound coherence. In remarkable congruence with patterns of figurative language developed in Descartes, Rousseau seeks to both ground and energize his account of political life by deploying diverse, often distinctly modern aspirations and metaphors in order to escape the Christian interruption of proper political ordering and concludes he cannot do so.

Generations of Christians, Janet Soskice demonstrates, once knew God and Christ by hundreds of remarkable names. These included the appellations ‘Messiah’, ‘Emmanuel’, ‘Alpha’, ‘Omega’, ‘Eternal’, ‘All-Powerful’, ‘Lamb’, ‘Lion’, ‘Goat’, ‘One’, ‘Word’, ‘Serpent’ and ‘Bridegroom’. In her much-anticipated new book, Soskice argues that contemporary understandings of divinity could be transformed by a return to a venerable analogical tradition of divine naming. These ancient titles – drawn from scripture – were chanted and sung, crafted and invoked (in polyphony and plainsong) as they were woven into the worship of the faithful. However, during the sixteenth century Descartes moved from ‘naming’ to ‘defining’ God via a series of metaphysical attributes. This made God a thing among things: a being amongst beings. For the author, reclaiming divine naming is not only overdue. It can also re-energise the relationship between philosophy and religious tradition. This path-breaking book shows just how rich and revolutionary such reclamation might be.