Syan Lopez

Syan Lopez

1st Year Graduate Student | Ph.D. program in Philosophy

What fundamentally animates my thinking is how we think of ourselves as human, or think about our culturally-particular conception of what it means to be human—what Jamaican philosopher Sylvia Wynter calls our "genre"—and how our discourse, cognition, perception, and behavior is contoured around this ordering principle of the Human, as well as its dialectical opposite "liminal" Non-Human. This has led me to an interest in philosophical anthropology, primarily an interest in the long trajectory of Africana/Black philosophy from the 18th century to now.

In Africana philosophy, I also have interests in the history of social-scientific thinking among Black thinkers, taking seriously Black social movements as philosophical schools, and the history of Africana social and political philosophy. Thinkers that I am interested in include (but certainly not limited to) David Walker, Maria Stewart, Martin Delany, Ida B. Wells, Alexander Crummell, William H. Ferris, W.E.B. Du Bois, Booker T. Washington, Marcus Garvey, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., Kwame Nkrumah, Walter Rodney, Frantz Fanon, and Huey P. Newton.

I also have related interests in the philosophy and history of science, intersections between philosophy and artificial intelligence, philosophy and cognitive science, and the global history and historiography of philosophy more generally. Outside of philosophy, I also have strong transdisciplinary interests, especially in the social sciences. This forms the basis of my interest in a Du Boisian program of philosophy, i.e. the use of our best available (social) science as the foundation of our social theory.

I received my AS in Biology and Industrial Biotechnology from Solano Community College in 2019. I then transferred to UC Berkeley where I received my BA in Philosophy in 2023.