Ricardo Friaz is a fifth-year PhD candidate in philosophy at the University of Oregon. His primary research areas are in Latin American philosophy, 19th and 20th-century Continental philosophy, and anticolonial studies.
What excites you about philosophy?
What excites and terrifies me about philosophy is its capacity for inexhaustible questioning. As the art and practice of examining the presuppositions of our knowledge, the meaning of Being, and the processes of reasoning, engaging in philosophy always carries the risk of overturning everything that once felt stable and known.
In this sense of inexhaustibility, I am most excited (and terrified) by philosophy’s ambiguous proximity to literature. As Roman Ingarden noted, literature has the strange quality of lacking any definite object, and as Maurice Blanchot further elaborated in his essay “Literature and the Right to Death,” this sense of literature means that it has both the capacity to say literally anything while producing no definite material work on the world. Put more clearly, it is exciting to think about the inexhaustible aspect of literature’s capacity to describe the world, and on the other hand, how it is nothing more than words and the play of language.
What common philosophical dilemma do you think has a clear answer?
Unfortunately, an ongoing topic of discussion in contemporary philosophy is the existence of trans women. There is nothing much of interest to be said about the issue beyond the clear answer that trans women are women. I do think there are many interesting and important questions being raised in trans philosophy, and I’m partial to the work of Amy Marvin and Aly E.
Who is your favorite philosopher and why?
My favorite philosophy is Baruch Spinoza. The main reason he is my favorite is that I find his central work, the Ethics, to be at once a comforting, scandalous, and endlessly rich work to read. There are other reasons I love him: his biography is fascinating, and reflects a lifelong commitment to philosophy and freedom. He presents an account of the world where there are no transcendent reasons for why life is the way it is, and although his philosophy is a severe critique of free will and contingency, I find his thought empowering for thinking about how to work towards a good world. I must also note that Spinoza scholars tend to be warm, caring, and brilliant people, and I write this as someone who is not myself a Spinoza scholar (just a huge fan).
What topic do you think is under explored in philosophy?
As a researcher of Latin American philosophy and other “minor” traditions in philosophy, I am very interested in the ways that academic philosophy determines what counts as philosophy. I’m particularly interested in the ways that different kinds of philosophy become incorporated into philosophy: is it by way of translating them into the dominant idiom, by attempting to create experts in those fields by way of supporting graduate students who study them, or by proliferating the different approaches to philosophy across universities? Some studies I have found meaningful in asking these questions about philosophy include John McCumber’s Philosophy Scare which shows how politics altered the landscape of American academic philosophy during the Cold War, Kristie Dotson’s “How is this paper philosophy?”, and Lewis Gordon’s Disciplinary Decadence.
Of course, I think most of the answers aren’t meaningful if the stunning lack of stable jobs in philosophy is not addressed. It does not make much difference to incorporate new kinds of philosophy into the discipline if there are no jobs to pay people to teach them.
What’s your favorite quote?
In a letter to a friend while he was in captivity, Fyodor Dostoevsky was writing of his love of God, and wrote: “If anyone could prove to me that Christ is outside the truth, and if the truth really did exclude Christ, I should prefer to stay with Christ and not with truth.”
The immensity of Dostoevsky’s sentiment here only grows grander to me over the years, and it is not because I consider myself a religious person but because of the power of Dostoevsky’s sentiment. There is something beyond all proof that exceeds it, and I don’t read this as a statement of negative theology or fanaticism, but as a recognition that there are truths beyond correspondence and proof; indeed, these are truths beyond truths, and such truths are typically referred to as untruths if not falsehoods and lies. Yet for all this, Dostoevsky should prefer to side with the lie. In this sense, I consider him to be a philosopher with proclivities similar to Søren Kierkegaard. Of course, I love Dostoevsky’s books, and The Brothers Karamazov is perhaps my favorite work of literature.
What do you like to do outside of work?
I love playing music, and I especially miss playing music with a band of graduate students I met in my labor union (shout-out to the now defunct Aunt Daddy). I must shamefully admit that I also play too many videogames, and I have been trying to sneak too many hours into Elden Ring lately.
What’s your top tip or advice for APA members reading this?
If you are a graduate student without a labor union representing you, have conversations with your coworkers and work to form a union. If you are a graduate student with a recognized labor union, get involved by having conversations with your coworkers to hear what problems they are facing and need support with.
If you are tenure-track faculty, unionize or join your union, and recognize that the struggles of your non-tenure-track coworkers are your struggles too. The attempts to ban tenure in Texas won’t be the last we see of the continued assault on workers in higher education, and fighting back starts with recognizing the common struggles among educators, as well as the significantly worse conditions that part-time faculty face.
This section of the APA Blog is designed to get to know our fellow philosophers a little better. We’re including profiles of APA members that spotlight what captures their interest not only inside the office, but also outside of it. We’d love for you to be a part of it, so please contact us via the interview nomination form here to nominate yourself or a friend.
Dr. Sabrina D. MisirHiralall is an editor at the Blog of the APA who currently teaches philosophy, religion, and education courses solely online for Montclair State University, Three Rivers Community College, and St. John’s University.
