Moses Estrada-Alvarez

Profile

I am a PhD candidate in Philosophy at the University of Leeds, UK; a Recognised Student in the Philosophy dept. at University of Oxford, UK (Michaelmas term, 2021; Hilary 2022); and was a Visiting Student in the Philosophy dept. at UC, Riverside (2020-21), participated in seminars on Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, and late Wittgenstein. I am distance based, residing in Riverside, California.

I previously completed a Master of Letters in Philosophy from University of Aberdeen, UK. 

I am interested in problems of the self and the other in the areas of Ordinary Language Philosophy, Post-Kantian Philosophy, Philosophy of Mind, Philosophy of Film, and Philosophy of Literature.

Research interests

The research problem I’m disccussing is the account of selfhood, self-knowledge, or subjectivity in Wittgenstein’s and Nietzsche’s works, which crosses over the boundaries of Ordinary Language Philosophy and Post-Kantian Philosophy. In both Wittgensteinian and Nietzschean studies there are positive and negative accounts of the self, i.e. that there is a self or soul, separte from the body, or that there is no-self or no-soul, only the body. I focus on developing a distinct account of the achieved self, where selfhood is something to be created or fashioned. In providing this account I take my cue from Cavell’s The Claim of Reason (esp. part IV). I read Emerson’s perfectionism back into Nietzsche’s call: “one must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star” (Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Prologue, 5). Philosophy’s attempt is to get us, reaching out to the readers, to recreat ourselves. 

In my two terms at Oxford University, under the supervision of Anita Avramides, I resorted to thinking and writing on Austin’s Philosophical Papers and Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, but returning to Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. In line with a prompt from Cavell’s diagnosis, I looked at the problem of estrangement from one’s words, world, and others. Again, I wanted to attempt an approach that is a reversal of the problem of Other Minds (a sort of self-estrangment), responding to the question of understanding one’s own mind as other. Is it plausible to claim that I understand my mind as another? Is it a claim? What could be the philosophical and autobiographical conditions, and particular circumstances for doing so? In the attempt to respond to these questions (while guest editing Issue 9 of Conversations: A Journal of Cavellian Studies), I found an answer in Nietzche’s Ecce Homo’s reading of On the Genology of Morality, and Beyond Good and Evil: an acknowledgment, confession, of the crucified self. My project recreates the conditions of the problem of self-estrangment. So, I discuss instances and examples of going “outside language-games” or “outside philosophy.” The goal is to put the human animal back into language, the world, and philosophy itself.

Guest Editor for Conversations: The Journal of Cavellian Studies, “Cavell and Dialectics”, Issue 9 (March, 2022). Wrote a chapter “Philosophy’s Antagonisms: Retracing the Self in Hamann, Fichte, Hegel, & Wittgenstein” for Wittgenstein and Classical German Philosophy (De Gruyter, forthcoming).

Interested in Latin American Philosophy and Mexican Philosophy, (e.g. Jose Vasconcelos’ La Raza Cósmica). I read Fransico Miro Quesada’s El hombre sin teoria parallel to Wittgenstein’s anti-theory posture, a sort of liberation from theory itself.

Pastor (Ordained) in the Seventh-Day Adventist Church. Live with my wife Silvia, and two kiddos in Riverside, California, USA.

Qualifications

• MLitt in Philosophy
• MDiv