with Rowman & Littlefield
The former chair of the UST Department of Philosophy and chief editor of Kritike: An Online Journal of Philosophy, Prof. Dr. Paolo A. Bolaños, has recently published a new book with an international academic publisher, Rowman & Littlefield (Lexington Books). The title of Bolaños’ book, his second with an international publisher, is Nietzsche and Adorno on Philosophical Praxis, Language, and Reconciliation: Towards an Ethics of Thinking .
Bolaños offers a philosophical notion of an “ethics of thinking,” a kind of thinking that is receptive to the non-identical character of the world of human and non-human objects. He experiments with the ideas of Friedrich Nietzsche and Theodor W. Adorno, who are presented as contemporary proponents of the Frühromantik tradition.
The author offers a reconstruction of the respective philosophies of language of Nietzsche and Adorno, and a rehearsal of their critique of metaphysics and identity thinking, to develop a notion of philosophical praxis grounded in the ethical dimension of thinking. Via Nietzsche and Adorno, he argues that thinking’s performative participation in uncertainty broadens the domain of reason, thereby also broadening our conceptual capacities and our receptivity to new possibilities of thinking. As an ethical praxis, thinking guards itself from the error of solidification, thereby opening philosophy to a reconciliatory, as opposed to domineering, reception of the world.
UST Department of Philosophy Chair Assoc. Prof. Dr. Jovito V. Cariño, mentions in his endorsement that Bolaños’ new book “comes at a time when not just philosophy but also thinking itself is severely challenged by the persistence of an instrumental culture which reckons philosophic praxis and, to use Bolaños’ expression, metaphorical thinking, as a surplus of effective human functioning. His proposal for an ethics of thinking is certainly an important contribution to the philosophic discourse in the Philippines beyond the constrictions of myopic nationalism and the priority of thinking for utilitarian ends.”
Bolaños’ Nietzsche and Adorno on Philosophical Praxis, Language, and Reconciliation is just one among several new books produced by various members of the UST Department of Philosophy in 2020, despite the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic: Deleuze and Guattari’s Philosophy of ‘Becoming-Revolutionary’ by Dr. Raniel Reyes (published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing, UK), Doing Philosophy in the Philippines: The Thomasian Collection (1924-1949) edited by Prof. Emeritus Alfredo P. Co (published by the UST Publishing House), and The Hornedo Reader: Selected Philosophical Texts and Essays edited by Dr. Roland Theuas Pada (published by the UST Publishing House).
Aside from teaching Philosophy at the Department of Philosophy, Faculty of Arts and Letters, and the Graduate School, Bolaños is also a research fellow of the UST Research Center for Culture, Arts, and Humanities, a member of the Philippine Academy of Philosophical Research (PAPR), and author of On Affirmation and Becoming: A Deleuzian Introduction to Nietzsche’s Ethics and Ontology, published by Cambridge Scholars Publishers in 2014.
