Eduardo Mendieta    

Associate Professor of Philosophy, Stony Brook University (SUNY)

Eduardo Mendieta is professor of philosophy at the State University of New York, Stony Brook. He is the author ofThe Adventures of Transcendental Philosophy (Rowman & Littlefield, 2002) and Global Fragments: Globalizations, Latinamericanisms, and Critical Theory (SUNY Press, 2007). He recently co-edited with Chad Kautzer, Pragmatism, Nation, and Race: Community in the Age of Empire (Indiana University Press, 2009). He is presently at work on another book entitled Philosophy’s War: Logos, Polemos, Topos.

From Imperial to Dialogical Cosmopolitanism: Humility, Solidarity, Patience

We can now survey the ruins of a Babelian tower of discourse about cosmopolitanism. We speak of elite travel lounge, Davos, banal as well as of reflexive, really existing, patriotic, and horizontal cosmopolitanisms. This lecture attempts to extract what is normative and ideal in the concept of cosmopolitanism by foregrounding the epistemic and moral dimensions of this attitude towards the world and other cultures. Kant, in a rather unexpected way, is profiled as the exemplification of what is called imperial cosmopolitanism, which is both blind and dismissive of its own material conditions of possibility. Through a discussion of the works of Nussbaum, Appiah, Mignolo, Butler, Benhabib and Beck the author elaborates a version of cosmopolitanism that is grounded, enlightened, and reflexive, one that corrects and supersedes Kant’s Eurocentric cosmopolitanism. We do not live in an age of cosmopolitanism, but in an age of cosmopolitization.