Francisco José Ramos

Ramos was born on December 31, 1950, in Caguas, Puerto Rico. He completed a master's degree (1976) and Ph.D (1982) in Philosophy at the Complutense University of Madrid. His studies focused on the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche, with a master's thesis titled Thought and Metaphor in Nietzsche’s Zarathustra and a doctoral dissertation titled The Thought of Transgression in the Nietzschean Philosophical Project.^[5] He attended University of Paris VIII (1977-1979) for his postdoctoral studies. Immediately after, he began a career as a professor at the University of Puerto Rico.

Ramos is also a founding member of the Puerto Rican Society of Philosophy (SPF, in Spanish), which he led from 1989 to 1991.^[1] He has been a guest lecturer and researcher at Georgetown University and the City University of New York, as well as universities in Europe, Asia and the Americas.^[6] He is a collaborator of the Hispanic Institute for Buddhist Studies^[7] and the European interdisciplinary group "Escritura e Imagen".^[8]

Ramos's philosophical thought, as illustrated in his three-volume Aesthetics of Thought^[3], questions thought as a philosophical category in its relation to language (or writing), and consequently, to the Real. His work combines approaches from Ancient philosophy—specifically Heraclitus and Parmenides—with other modern and contemporary traditions, such as Psychoanalysis,^[9] Ontology and Buddhism.

In the first volume of Aesthetics of Thought,^[3] Francisco José Ramos establishes a philosophical proposal that concerns aesthetics, not in its conventional philosophical sense, that is, judgments on beauty, but as a type of sensibility. Thought is not addressed as a mental activity, but rather as the plurality of images and configurations that constitute said activity. Fundamental to the proposal of Aesthetics of Thought is the acknowledgment of impermanence as that which escapes any configuration or conceptual framework— the original “articulation” is encoded into the written word or the “movement of thought”, presumed to be violently captured by the concept.

The second volume, Dance in the Labyrinth: Meditation upon Human Action (2003),^[10] attends to the particular relationship between philosophical language and art. This volume also poses several questions regarding the connections between philosophical thought and capitalism, specifically, the relationship between thought and the advertising industry. Accordingly, Ramos introduces conceptual distinctions between aesthetics, the work of art, and artistic experience, the last of which is related to the practice of wisdom.

The third volume of the trilogy, The Invention of the Self (2008),^[11] is conceived as a dialogue between the neurosciences, Psychoanalysis, and Buddhist thought. Therein Ramos outlines connections between mind, body, organism and brain. Ramos distances himself from existing attempts to reduce mental activity to mere neuronal processes— to the dualist separations of mind and body. In doing so, he incorporates the non-dualistic legacy of Heraclitus, Lucretius, Marcus Aurelius, Spinoza, Hume, Nietzsche, Foucault, and Deleuze. Ramos thus puts forth a proposal that accounts for the mind-body problem and the urgent need to reach a different way of thinking about the human condition.