Ana Pedroso, Ph.D.

• Ph.D., Philosophy, University of California, Santa Cruz
• Master of Arts, Philosophy, University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee
• Master of Arts, Economics, University of Southern California
• Mestrado em Economia, Fundação Getulio Vargas, Rio de Janeiro

I am animated by social and political questions approached through a historical lens. My major sources of inspiration are Hannah Arendt, Simone Weil, Friedrich Schiller, and Immanuel Kant. Thematically, I am driven by questions about taste, common sense, uprootedness, and plurality. I also have a serious interest in the philosophy of economics, particularly in discussing the conceptions of the human being and sociability presupposed in the works of Adam Smith and Karl Marx.

I am currently working on Arendt’s interpretation of Kant’s plurality. Plurality relates to the idea that human beings inhabit the world in togetherness. My central argument is that Arendt sees Kant as more “aware than any other philosopher of human plurality” insofar as he makes this dwelling concrete through an intersubjective approach to the human faculties of thought. More specifically, to inhabit and share the world, humans, as opposed to irrational animals and other rational creatures with no sensibility, have jointly developed taste. This complex faculty operates through a non-discursive and spontaneous prospect of communal agreement on the ‘quality’ of empirical objects (appearances) that are part and parcel of everyday human experience.

Social and Political Philosophy, Aesthetics, Ethics, Phenomenology