Parents: Octavio Paz Solórzano, Josefina Lozano.Known For: Prolific Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat.Finally, Alfonso Méndez Plancarte considers Sor Juana’s poem through the lens of the history of literature see his El sueño (Mexico City: Imprenta Univesitaria, 1951). On Jose Pascual Buxo’s view, Sor Juana’s poem is, above all, a piece of literature that contains diverse emblems to be disclosed see his ‘El sueño de Sor Juana: Alegoría y modelo del mundo’ in Sábado (August 15, 1981). Margaret Sayers Peden (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988). Another view is provided by Octavio Paz, who reads First Dream as a poem which, while it does not provide an account of how genuine knowledge can be achieved, nonetheless provides us with the knowledge of why Aristotelian and Neoplatonic epistemolgies fail see his Sor Juana or, The Traps of Faith, tr.
(See also, Ludwig Pfandl, Juana Inés de la Cruz, die zehnte Muse von Mexico: Ihr Leben, ihre Dichtung, ihre Psyche (Munich: H. It is about scientific knowledge in the way hermetic philosophers conceived it in the 16th and 17th centuries, annexed to what is currently known as the magic tradition.’ (Elías Trabulse, El círculo roto, 82). Some authors have read the poem from a more psychological point of view, e.g., Ludwig Pfandl, while others have underlined Sor Juana’s contact with the magic tradition, e.g., Elías Trabulse, who considers that: “The interpretations that have wished to see in this work an expression of philosophical knowledge have gotten closer to its meaning since, in reality, it is about knowledge, not philosophical, but scientific knowledge of the world, although we must make clear here that the word ‘scientific’ doesn’t have the connotations we give it nowadays. On my view, Sor Juana takes an epistemological approach to philosophy, as do Bacon and Descartes, but she does not propose a new method this is not because of some radical skepticism on her part, but because of the enormity of the task of the human mind achieving complete knowledge. My conclusion is that Sor Juana shares with modern philosophers the critical attitude against tradition she holds that traditional methods do not enable us to reach knowledge about either the remotest causes or the closest effects. With respect to her conception of understanding, I will show that it is both the sign of man’s filiation with God and a faculty that displays deficiencies and limitations with respect to the difficult task of attaining knowledge.įinally, I examine Sor Juana’s criticism both of the Neoplatonic method, which looks for a vision of the universe as a whole (via the conceptual capacity to establish the links among all beings), as well as of the deductive method of the Aristotelian- Scholastic tradition, which attempts (through the categories and definitions, and via proximate genus and specific difference) to reduce the unmanageable diversity of beings to some specific characteristics and laws. I stress the importance that the author gives to sensibility and the physiological apparatus that grounds and explains sensation. In this chapter, I focus on the faculties by which we gain knowledge, namely, sensibility and the understanding, as well as on the methodological framework within which Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz examines them.
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