Volume 17, Issue 1, Fall 2012
Ethics, Indifference, and Social Concern
Alejandro A. Vallega
Pages 55-66
Improper Borders
On the Openings and Convergences of Continental Philosophy with Non-Western Thought in Charles Scott’s Lectures on Cultural Borders
In 2010, Charles Scott gave a course at the Collegium Phaenomenologicum in Italy titled “Bordered Americans.” The course followed his concern with understanding philosophical thought given our concrete cultural dynamics today. The lectures addressed the question of the limits and delimitations of borders as dynamic transformative events, which occur in encroachments between distinct and ever moving and shifting cultural configurations and borders. Scott emphasized the possibilities of thinking in such spaces, and ultimately situated Continental American philosophy in such disclosure. This essay is the fruit of long conversations with Scott about these issues; in it I aim to add a Latin American voice to his incisive analysis.