Hi, I’m Mario Saenz, professor of philosophy, chair of the philosophy department (2010 – 2013) at LeMoyne College in Syracuse, New York. I’ve been honored to receive awards for my teaching, scholarship, and service including the LeMoyne College Joseph C. Georg endowed professorship (2006 – 2009), Hispanic Heritage Month Honored Educator (2011), and LeMoyne College Scholar of the Year (2000) and have been lucky to have been invited to conferences around the world (London, Nairobi, Caracas, Lima, Cordoba, Rome). From 1997 to 2000 I served as chair of the philosophy department, and from 2000 to 2003 I was director of the integral honors program.
In 2002 I led LeMoyne’s first honors course taught abroad. The World of the Other, taught in Guatemala, took LeMoyne honors students to some of the most beautiful and historic, yet poorest locales in the world. In addition to serving as head professor of this course, I also envisioned and designed the course, obtained funding to allow students of all means to participate, and organized all the travel and logistics. Students in this course have typically found it to be a life-changing experience.
Publications
The Identity of Liberation in Latin American Thought: Latin American Historicism and the Phenomenology of Leopoldo Zea in which I offer fresh insights into the role of Mexican intellectuals in the creation of a Latin American “philosophy of liberation.” Specifically, I analyze Zea’s thought to show how it used the nationalistic and mestizo theory and practice of the Mexican Revolution to, in the words of the Cuban literary critic González Echeverría, “recover the colonial [and, I would add, post-independence] archive.”
Latin American Perspectives on Globalization: Ethics, Politics, Alternative Visions gathers in one volume internationally well-known figures in Latin American philosophy and criticism. Leopoldo Zea, Ofelia Schutte, Walter Mignolo, Raúl Fornet, Jorge Gracia, Eduardo Mendieta, and Debra Castillo, among others, wrote original essays for this volume. I conceived and carried out this project in order to bring to an English-reading public important reflections on globalization from the perspective of significant Latin American intellectuals. Contemporary conditions of inequality, new critiques and constructions of identity, as well as projects of liberation in light of the conditions produced by “globalized” capitalism were the principal topics treated in this text.