In Memory of Eduardo Mendieta (December 28, 1963–December 17, 2025)
To be moral is to have the fortitude and courage to look at the world through the eyes of the homeless, the destitute, the refugee, the orphan, the single mother displaced by war, the inmate in a prison where their lives are being wasted.”
- Eduardo Mendieta
Our former colleague and friend Professor Eduardo Mendieta passed away on December 17th after a long experience with cancer. Eduardo joined the Department of Philosophy as an Irvine Scholar (later renamed the Gerardo Marín Fellowship) in 1995. He had a huge impact during a transformative time for the Department, including the subsequent hires of Yoko Arisaka and David Kim (also an Irvine Fellow), and collaborations and lifelong friendships with other faculty including David Batstone, Lois Lorentzen, and Pedro Lange-Churion. He also collaborated with many international luminaries in critical theory and post-colonial philosophy including Jürgen Habermas, Karl-Otto Apel, and Enrique Dussel. He left the University of San Francisco in 2001 and took up a position at Stony Brook University in New York.
His former colleagues at Stony Brook (he moved to Penn State University in 2015) shared the following testimonial to his impact on the profession of philosophy, and they have given permission to reprint it here.
“Eduardo Mendieta was a highly-regarded scholar and a dynamic teacher. He specialized in social and political philosophy, Latin American philosophy, critical theory, and philosophy of race. His influence as a mentor and advisor continues.
Mendieta was born in Pereira, Colombia. He earned his B.A. in philosophy at Rutgers University, his M.A. in Systematic Theology at Union Theological Seminary, and his doctorate in philosophy at the New School for Social Research under the direction of Richard Bernstein. He taught at the University of San Francisco from 1995 to 2001 before joining the Stony Brook philosophy department, where he was Director of the Latin American and Caribbean Studies Center from 2005 to 2008 and chair of the Department of Philosophy from 2012 to 2015, after which he moved to Penn State. He also held visiting positions at the Universidad Iberoamericana and the European Humanities University. Mendieta was executive editor of Radical Philosophy Review from 2003 to 2007, and a founding editor of the American Philosophical Association's Newsletter of Hispanics in Philosophy.
Mendieta investigated diverse topics including animal rights, colonialism, Latin American philosophy, globalization, mass incarceration, and torture, often by building on the conceptual resources of Frankfurt School-style Critical Theory. His many publications include The Adventures of Transcendental Philosophy: Karl-Otto Apel's Semiotics and Discourse Ethics (2002), Global Fragments: Globalizations, Latinamericanisms, and Critical Theory (2007), and The Philosophical Animal: On Zoopoetics and Interspecies Cosmopolitanism (2024). Abolition Democracy: Beyond Empire, Torture and War (2006) is a series of interviews between Mendieta and Angela Davis on mass incarceration and torture.
Mendieta will be long remembered by his former colleagues and students at Stony Brook for his vivacity in thinking and acting as well as for the broad scope of his teaching and writing. He was a philosopher with extraordinary moral and political vision, and he will be deeply missed by all who knew him and his work.”