This is the seventeenth installment of The Cocoon Goes Global, a series that gives a sense of what the philosophy profession looks like outside of the Anglophone West. Today's entry is by Dr. Laurencia Sáenz Benavides, Invited Professor at the School of Philosophy or the University of Costa Rica Twitter: @laurenciasaenz
In Costa Rica, philosophy is taught in the last year of high school. It is the State-funded universities, however, which constitute the backbone of the country’s philosophical profession (organization of conferences, academic publications, and formation of philosophy teachers).
In the spirit of the Cordoba University Reform in 1918, public universities in Costa Rica are autonomous. They are also State-funded by Constitutional mandate, but in the last few decades there have been consistent disagreements between the successive Governments and university authorities, the latter decrying a chronic funding failure. Successive governments have failed to provide the required 1.5% of the GNP, which is destined for Higher Education. Within Universities there are, as elsewhere, strong criticisms of dramatic salary gaps between Vice-chancellors, Administrative and Academic Staff.
The School of Philosophy of the University of Costa Rica (UCR) has in many ways functioned as the gravitational centre of the profession within the country. This may be partly due to the fact that the University of Costa Rica, founded in 1940, was the first academic space where the study of philosophy became formally institutionalized. According to the philosopher Alexander Jiménez Matarrita, the main architect of what he calls the Costa Rican “philosophical institutionality” was Constantino Láscaris, a Spanish philosopher who migrated to the Central American country in the mid 1950’s. Láscaris actively pushed for the creation of the Costarican Association of Philosophy and promoted the foundation of the UCR’s philosophy Journal, Revista de Filosofía, as well as other public Higher-Education institutions, such as the Universidad Nacional (UNA) and the Instituto Tecnológico de Costa Rica (ITCR).
UCR’s School of Philosophy offers undergraduate and postgraduate degrees. Most teaching is offered in Spanish, but in recent years some optional modules are taught in English.The predominant tradition is what we might loosely refer to as “Western Philosophy”.
Philosophy also has an important presence at the Escuela de Estudios Generales, where it is taught together with other areas of the Humanities, and at the Sede de Occidente of the UCR, located in San Ramón, Alajuela. The philosophy department of the Universidad Nacional (UNA), founded in 1975, also offers undergraduate degrees in philosophy, a Masters in Bioethics and a Postgraduate programme in Latin-American studies. Apart from these institutions, philosophy is also taught at the School of Languages and Social Sciences of the Technological Institute of Costa Rica (ITCR).
There are decent research opportunities within the Philosophy Departments of State-funded universities. These, however, are primarily accessible to tenured staff. In general, a heavy teaching load and an increasing amount of bureaucratic work – and precarious working conditions faced by untenured teaching staff – are the main obstacles for doing research. Although each Department can allocate some research-time to its academic staff, there’s an increasing tendency to look for external funding – which, according to professor Sergio Rojas Peralta, works de facto as a form of privatisation of research.
Alongside teaching and research, a core element of Costa Rican Public Universities is “Acción Social” (Community Service), the area that seeks to contribute to effecting the social “transformations needed for the improvement of the quality of life in the country”. This area is however largely neglected by philosophers, according to professor Kattya Arroyo. In Arroyo’s view, “philosophers have stopped dialoguing among themselves and with Costa Rican society”. Unsurprisingly, it is women academics who overwhelmingly engage in community service, which, according to sociologist Dr. Isabel Gamboa Barboza, is configured as a less prestigious area in the University, and with the lowest possibilities for work-promotion.
A relatively high number of students are enrolled, but often less out of an interest in philosophy itself, than in a bid to get a place, with the prospect of being able to change tack in the future (students need to pass an exam in order to be admitted to university, and some degrees require higher marks than others). This means that many of them are not interested in the lectures, which correlates to a high termly drop-out.
Systemic exclusions: philosophy is not innocent
We do not have hard data on how the student body is constituted in terms of gender, class, race and other variables, and we lack a qualitative study allowing us to assess how minority students feel about their experience in philosophy departments, but I think it is generally agreed that the majority of the student body in philosophy departments – as well as of the teaching staff – is white/mestizo and male. As an example, in the UCR’s Philosophy Postgraduate programme, only 4 women are enrolled, contra nearly 40 men. In some Departments, female students have informally complained to members of staff about persistent instances of sexism and misogyny coming from professors as well as from male students.
In all Philosophy Departments here, most if not all Senior Professors (Profesor Catedrático) are male.
Most women are currently hired in untenured teaching positions. Thus Costa Rica’s philosophical profession suffers from the same endemic problems of exclusion of minorities that characterize most Philosophy Departments in Western Academia.
There are, of course, many factors that explain this situation, which are not exclusive to Philosophy: structural socio-economic inequalities, a history of systemic racism and sexism, which have particularly affected Afro-Costa Ricans and Indigenous Costa Ricans (up until 1994, Indigenous Costa Ricans were denied the right to vote). However, it is worth mentioning that in Costa Rica, the myth of national exceptionalism, which undergirds many of these racist, sexist and classist practices, was also developed by philosophers and manifests in the Costa Rican philosophical tradition.
Between the 1950s and the 1980s, a small but influential number of Costa Rican philosophers took on the task of imagining an “impossible country”. Intersecting with a pre-existing ideology, which was instrumental in the creation of the Costa Rican Nation in the 19th Century, these “nationalist metaphysicians”, as philosopher Alexánder Jiménez calls them, argued that Costa Rica’s essential character was constitutively rational. They explained the country’s constitutive rationality by appealing to a supposed racial homogeneity. Unlike other Central American and Caribbean countries, Costa Rica was, in their imagination, predominantly white. And so, unlike these other countries, doomed to irrationality, political disorder and violence, Costa Rica’s purported whiteness made it naturally bound to rationality, and therefore to order and peace (Jiménez, A. 2005, p. 221). Although other kinds of narratives were in circulation at the time, this mythological ethnic nationalism became hegemonic. In Jiménez’s view, this might be partly explained by the influence enjoyed by these philosophers, who had ties to the main political party and worked in the Public Service (Jiménez, 2005, p.55). Where whiteness and rationality are conflated -the image of rationality being coded as masculine in most of the philosophical Western canon-, it is unsurprising that those deemed capable of “doing philosophy”, the rational occupation par excellence, will typically be white and male.
Such historical analyses encourage us to consider how we, as a profession, are today contributing to this continued state of inequality. And what are we doing, as a professional community, to change, arrest or subvert this situation? Visibly, not enough. One tangible obstacle to action is the absence of a philosophical community. In line with David Villena Saldaña’s analysis of the Peruvian philosophical profession, philosophy in Costa Rica tends to be characterised by its insularity. There is a pervasive lack of engagement with philosophical work done outside one’s areas of expertise. According to some, this is the result of the the lack of activities motivating philosophers to engage with each other’s work. Another problem is the lack of connections between Philosophy and other academic fields. For professor Gabriela Arguedas, this lack of relation and dialogue with other academic disciplines betrays an outdated vision of what philosophy is. Interdisciplinary work is undervalued.
For other philosophy professionals, building a philosophical community requires recognizing one’s membership of a group, and working “in favour” of the group, by facilitating spaces for dialogue, rather than “against it”, through negative criticism. This however strikes me as problematic, given the persistent problems of exclusion: who is recognized as part of the group? To what extent do conscious and unconscious biases determine who is recognized as a full member of the philosophical community? Conversely, when a group has failed to challenge persistent exclusionary practices, working to support it can also mean perpetuating those practices. As professor Laura Alvarez notes, we ought to be more critical of practices of domination between teaching staff and students, and among students. When asked about the conditions for a more cooperative academic atmosphere, another female professor puts it bluntly: it will have to be built over the ashes of the current patriarchal community. I agree with them both. The issue of how to transform these practices remains therefore an open question, and I take it to be one of the main challenges that our profession needs to address.
I also wonder how the lack of community plays out within Costa Rican culture more broadly. As a consequence of the mentioned mythological ethno-nationalist narratives, Costa Ricans have a tendency to think of themselves as “peaceful”. This self-understanding is often reinforced by Costa Ricans’ pride in living in a country that abolished its Army after a civil war in 1949, and has not known any armed conflict since then. As some historians, sociologists and philosophers have pointed out, this self-perception serves to mask real conflicts and violence within Costa Rican society. And it might contribute to more covert expressions of hostility. Costa Ricans, it is said, have a low tolerance for conflict. This means that hostility tends to occur through more surreptitious means: hypocrisy, professional “back-stabbings”, and “crab mentality”. In popular culture, we sum it up in the expression “pueblo chico, infierno grande”: “small town, big hell”.
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Many thanks to my colleagues Laura Alvarez, Gabriela Arguedas, Kattya Arroyo, Luis Fallas, Roberto Fragomeno, Alexánder Jiménez, Luis Adrián Mora, Juan Diego Moya, Sergio Rojas and Mario Solís for kindly giving me their extensive comments on the philosophical profession in Costa Rica.
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