Francisco José Ramos

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 a 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 delivers a proposal that accounts for the mind-body question and the urgent need to reach a different way of thinking about the human condition.

The second volume, Dance in the Labyrinth: Meditation upon Human Action (2003), 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.

Ramos is also a founding member of the Puerto Rican Society of Philosophy (SPF, in Spanish), which he led from 1989 to 1991. 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. He is a collaborator of the Hispanic Institute for Buddhist Studies and the European interdisciplinary group "Escritura e Imagen".

Francisco José Ramos (born in Caguas in 1950) 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.

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.