After a brief hiatus, we are pleased to introduce a special double issue of the Journal of Mexican Philosophy. Editing a journal is demanding and is more difficult when it is independently operated without a staff, as is the case of our journal. So we are especially grateful to our Editorial Team for helping us get through this rough patch, especially to Manuel Vargas and Clinton Tolley and James Maffie.

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The first part our double issue was originally intended to be a special issue of JMxP, introduced by our guest editor, Sergio Armando Gallegos-Ordorica. Although no longer a separate issue on its own, the first four papers of Volume 4 were originally presented at UCSD to commemorate the 100th anniversary of José Vasconcelos’s birth. As our readers already know, Vasconcelos was one of the most provocative and systematic philosophers of 20th century Mexican philosophy—if not the most provocative—and these papers represent the leading scholarship on a philosopher who continues to challenge and provoke us. It is our pleasure to publish this set of papers here.  

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The second part of our double issue includes two essays: In the first, Suárez Gómez and Imaz argue that Edmundo O’Gorman’s concept of historical “invention” develops a philosophy of history according to which historical realities are not simply discovered as fixed facts but are constituted through acts of interpretation and narration, which are subject to change. In the second, Sánchez-Antonio reconstructs the Zapotec philosophical worldview in which darkness and light are complementary primordial forces whose dynamic unity, mediated by vital breath, grounds the structure and ongoing balance of reality. This essay serves in part to help to diversify our knowledge and understanding of indigenous philosophies across the Americas.

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In addition to the above two papers, readers will appreciate James Maffie’s essay-length review of a new work on Aztec philosophy, How to Be Grateful: An Aztec Guide to the Art of Gratitude (Princeton University Press, 2025). We are also excited to introduce what we consider a new genre of philosophical writing: the “book prospective.” Give the recent surge of interest in Mexican philosophy, we are also witnessing an increase of the number of translations of Mexican philosophy. However, as anyone who has tried their hand at it knows, translating a text faithfully is a long, laborious effort that can take years—requiring multiple drafts, occasions to test drive the translation, time for friends, colleagues, and students to share their feedback, and so forth. One danger of the amount of time required to translate is that we sometimes discover that more than one of us is working on translating the same text, which conflicts with our aim to make as much of the best Mexican philosophy available in English as possible. In that spirit, we plan to give translators an opportunity to announce their translation to the world—so long as they are working diligently on it and are far enough along—so that other scholars thinking about translating the same text might choose another or choose to collaborate with those already working on the translation. And, of course, our goal is also to generate some anticipation for the new translation. So, for this issue, we are featuring an in-progress translation of Antonio Caso’s La Existencia Como Economía, Como Desinterés Y Como Caridad (1943), undertaken Juan Carlos Gonzalez & Alexander Stehn.

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We are grateful for all the contributors and hope you enjoy this extended issue of JMxP.

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The Editors,

Carlos Alberto Sánchez & Robert Eli Sanchez

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