Francisco José Ramos

Francisco José Ramos is a Puerto Rican philosopher, poet, and retired university professor. He is the author of the philosophical trilogy Aesthetics of Thought. He is also a numerary member of the Puerto Rican Spanish Academy.

Biography 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. 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. He is a collaborator of the Hispanic Institute for Buddhist Studies and the European interdisciplinary group "Escritura e Imagen".

Thought Ramos's philosophical thought, as illustrated in his three-volume Aesthetics of Thought, Ontology and Buddhism.

Works

The Drama of Philosophical Writing (1998): In the first volume of Aesthetics of Thought, 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 Invention of the Self (2008): The third volume of the trilogy, The Invention of the Self (2008), 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.