Eduardo Mendieta

Eduardo Mendieta (born 28 December 1963) was a Colombian and American philosopher and academic. He was Professor of Philosophy at Penn State University, and acting director of the Rock Ethics Institute. Mendieta's research focused on ethics, political philosophy, Latinx philosophy, Latin American philosophy, critical theory (especially the Frankfurt School), philosophy of race, and feminist philosophy. Mendieta investigated topics including animal rights, colonialism, globalization, mass incarceration, and torture, often by building on the conceptual resources of Frankfurt School-style critical theory. His publications included The Adventures of Transcendental Philosophy: Karl-Otto Apel's Semiotics and Discourse Ethics (2002), Global Fragments: Globalizations, Latinamericanisms, and Critical Theory (2007), and The Philosophical Animal: On Zoopoetics and Interspecies Cosmopolitanism (2024). Global Fragments has been described as an "important" contribution to ways of thinking about globalization that are "too often ignored in Western European and North American philosophy". Abolition Democracy: Beyond Empire, Torture and War (2006) is a series of interviews between Mendieta and Angela Davis on mass incarceration and torture, which was praised as "a much needed political intervention in mainstream discourse about the Abu Ghraib case". He also translated the work of Enrique Dussel and Karl-Otto Apel, and co-edited The Power of Religion in the Public Sphere (2011), Reading Kant's Geography (2011), and Habermas and Religion (2013). He was interviewed about the challenges and opportunities facing Latinos in contemporary academic philosophy. Mendieta died on 17 December 2025 at the age of 61.