Francisco José Ramos

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. 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". Ramos' philosophical thought, as illustrated in his three-volume Aesthetics of Thought, questions thought as a philosophical category in its relation to language (or writing), and consequently, to the Real. His work combines approaches from Ancient philosophy—specifically Heraclitus and Parmenides—with other modern and contemporary traditions, such as Psychoanalysis, Ontology and Buddhism. In the first volume of Aesthetics of Thought, Francisco José Ramos establishes a philosophical proposal that concerns aesthetics, not in its conventional philosophical sense, that is, judgments on beauty, but as a type of sensibility. Thought is not addressed as a mental activity, but rather as the plurality of images and configurations that constitute said activity.