Carlos Pereda - Böcker

Carlos Pereda’s Mexico Unveiled is a fresh, idiosyncratic synthesis of twentieth-century Mexican philosophy that puts contemporary debates about Mexican identity politics into a critical perspective. This edition—translated, edited, and introduced by Noell Birondo—brings the Mexican thinker’s ideas to a new English-language audience.In three engaging essays written in a peerless prose style, Pereda considers the persistent influence of European colonialism on Mexican intellectual life, the politics of inclusion, and the changing ideas of what it means to be Mexican. He identifies three “vices”—social habits, customs, and beliefs inherited from European colonialism—that have influenced the development of Mexican national identity: subaltern fervor, craving for novelty, and nationalist zeal. Pereda demonstrates that these three tendencies have led Mexican intellectuals, and Mexican society more generally, to uncritically adopt a politics of exclusion and destructive nationalist attitudes.Using a strategy he calls “nomadic” thinking—the act of moving beyond our cultural preconceptions and habits of thinking—Pereda guides readers through a number of examples drawn from Mexican philosophy and culture that illustrate these tendencies. At its core, Mexico Unveiled is an accessible and entertaining introduction to the philosophical themes that have long occupied Pereda’s life and work and Mexican philosophy more generally.

Carlos Pereda’s Mexico Unveiled is a fresh, idiosyncratic synthesis of twentieth-century Mexican philosophy that puts contemporary debates about Mexican identity politics into a critical perspective. This edition—translated, edited, and introduced by Noell Birondo—brings the Mexican thinker’s ideas to a new English-language audience.In three engaging essays written in a peerless prose style, Pereda considers the persistent influence of European colonialism on Mexican intellectual life, the politics of inclusion, and the changing ideas of what it means to be Mexican. He identifies three “vices”—social habits, customs, and beliefs inherited from European colonialism—that have influenced the development of Mexican national identity: subaltern fervor, craving for novelty, and nationalist zeal. Pereda demonstrates that these three tendencies have led Mexican intellectuals, and Mexican society more generally, to uncritically adopt a politics of exclusion and destructive nationalist attitudes.Using a strategy he calls “nomadic” thinking—the act of moving beyond our cultural preconceptions and habits of thinking—Pereda guides readers through a number of examples drawn from Mexican philosophy and culture that illustrate these tendencies. At its core, Mexico Unveiled is an accessible and entertaining introduction to the philosophical themes that have long occupied Pereda’s life and work and Mexican philosophy more generally.

Practical Holism and Nomadic Thought invites us to think of societies as organizations built with moral, legal, political, and economic materials that interact in dynamic, and often simultaneous, ways. According to this view, which Carlos Pereda calls “practical holism,” our practical life is constantly motivated by many different kinds of values that often conflict with one another. This book examines how practical normativity, guiding how we behave from seemingly trivial interactions to the deepest existential dilemmas, is crossed by tensions. Pereda argues that only nomadic thought—willing to transgress received conceptual distinctions or groupings—is capable of capturing those many interactions. No qualitative or quantitative typology is indisputable; leaving behind hitherto well-established pathways is not impossible. At its best, nomadic thought considers all of these as proposals worth pondering and discussing, to be approved or rejected, always in a provisional form.