Profile
Rocío Zambrana (Assistant Professor)
Office: 331 PLC
Office Hours: Tuesday 10am-12noon
Phone: 541-346-4844
Email: zambrana@uoregon.edu
View CV
RESEARCH
I specialize in Continental Philosophy, with focus on German Idealism and Frankfurt School Critical Theory. I am interested in the problem of normative authority and practices of justification; forms of rationality and rationalization; the entanglement of recognition and misrecognition; the idea of immanent critique; and the nature of conceptual change.
My current research seeks to reconstruct G.W.F. Hegel’s account of normative authority, and pursues the consequences of Hegel’s insights for notions of critique and justification within the Frankfurt School tradition. Two book projects grow out of my current research.
In my first book project, Hegel’s Theory of Determinacy, I aim to show that Hegel carries the legacy of Kant’s idealism forward, albeit in a new direction. Hegel’s theory of determinacy is a theory of normativity that supports the view that norms are radically revisable given that they gain and lose authority throughout history. Hegel’s emphasis on negativity, however, should not be read as merely stemming from an interest in the ways in which authority fails, is contested, and prompts revision of the most significant commitments of a society. Negativity must be traced to his theory of form that is most prominently elaborated in the Science of Logic. The inseparability of form and content established formally in the Logic accounts for why determinacy is the result of social practices, anchored in material existence, and fundamentally pragmatic. But it also entails that, for formal reasons, normative authority is fundamentally precarious. I work out key arguments for this reading in my essays “Hegel's Hyperbolic Formalism” and “Pippin's Hegel.” Hegel’s Theory of Determinacy is in progress.
In a second book project, tentatively entitled The Logic of Critique, I will assess problem of normative foundations within the Frankfurt School in light of what I analyze as the dialectical reversibility of critical categories. Critical categories are socio-historical institutions. As such, they are subject to contestation and revision in light of new material conditions. Yet they are at the same time reversible: they retain the possibility of reverting to their opposite and generating both positive and negative effects even when they enjoy normative authority. I seek to show that dialectical reversibility calls for a shift in the way that critical and justificatory practices are understood within the Frankfurt School tradition.
Beyond German Idealism (esp. Kant and Hegel) and Critical Theory (esp. Adorno, Habermas, Honneth, and Fraser), I explore these topics via the work of Rousseau, Marx, Nietzsche, Lukács, Foucault, Derrida, Hannah Arendt, and classical and contemporary American Pragmatism.
SELECTED PUBLICATIONS
Edited Volumes
Expression in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century German Philosophy, special issue of Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal 27:2 (2006).
Book Chapters
“Love in Hegel’s Logic,” forthcoming in Love in the Philosophy of Hegel, ed. Arthur Kok and Timo Slootweg, Leiden: Brill International.
Articles
"Hegel's Legacy," forthcoming in "Continental Philosophy: What and Where Will It Be?" The Southern Journal of Philosophy 50:2 (2012).
"Hegel's Logic of Finitude," Continental Philosophy Review 45:2 (2012).
“Hegel’s Hyperbolic Formalism,” Bulletin of the Hegel Society of Great Britain 61 (2010).
“Struggle and Transgression in Hegel’s Jena Writings,” Women in Philosophy Journal (2003-2004).
Anayra Santory, Luis A. Avilés, Bairá Soto, Joyce González, Roxana Román, Rocío Zambrana, “Disparidad de género en la niñez: El caso de Puerto Rico y El Salvador,” in Memorias del Cuarto Congreso Nacional Sobre las Mujeres, Humacao, Editorial de la Universidad de Puerto Rico, April 10 and 11 2003.
Review Essays
"Pippin’s Hegel,” review of Hegel’s Practical Philosophy: Rational Agency as Ethical Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal 31:2 (2010).
Review of Songsuk Susan Hahn, Contradiction in Motion: Hegel’s Organic Concept of Value and Life (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2007), Bulletin of the Hegel Society of Great Britain 59/60 (2009).
TEACHING INTERESTS
My teaching interests are in Kant and Hegel, 18th-, 19th-, and 20th-Century Continental Philosophy, Social and Political Philosophy, Philosophy of History, and Modern Philosophy.
During 2011-2012, I will teach a graduate seminar on Autonomy examining Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, and Nietzsche, an author's course on Kant focused on the Critique of Pure Reason, a course on Immanent Critique in Critical Theory, a survey of the History of 19th Century Philosophy, and a course on Logic.
Throughout 2010-2011, I taught an author’s course on Hegel focused on the Phenomenology of Spirit, a topics seminar on Immanence and Transcendence in Frankfurt School Critical Theory, a course on Global Justice, and a course on the History of 19th Century Philosophy.
Future courses include Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason; Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit; Hegel’s Science of Logic; Paradoxes of Autonomy in Rousseau, Kant, and Nietzsche; Recognition and Misrecognition in Rousseau, Hegel, and Marx; Immanence and Transcendence in Critical Theory; Adorno’s Negative Dialectics; Habermas’ Theory of Communicative Action; Hegel and Derrida.