My dear friend Eduardo Mendieta died earlier this month. He taught in the philosophy departments of the University of San Francisco, Stony Brook University and Penn State. There is an announcement from Penn State here, and the news is also reported at Daily Nous. There are some tributes at the funeral home site.

Eduardo was an early supporter of my work, writing reviews of some of my books and inviting me to speak at Stony Brook University. While I was visiting Stony Brook, we talked about Kant and geography, and came up with the plan to do a collection on that topic. With the help of a British Academy conference grant, a Leverhulme fellowship, and some funding from our institutions we were able to run two events, one in New York in 2007 and one in Durham in 2008, which became the book Reading Kant’s Geography (SUNY Press, 2011). Putting David Harvey in conversation with Onora O’Neill and Ed Casey, or Robert Bernasconi with Michael Church and Charlie Withers, is a fond memory, and would not have been possible without Eduardo. (I write a bit about the book here.)

We also worked together for many years as editors of Environment and Planning D: Society and Space – Eduardo, Emily Brady, and Peter Gratton were crucial in bringing philosophers and other theorists into its pages. In particular, I remember Eduardo’s help in persuading Judith Butler to accept my invitation to give the journal’s 25th anniversary lecture, delivered to a packed room at the AAG in San Francisco, and later published as “Torture and the Ethics of Photography“. Together with Nigel Thrift, we also put together a special issue on Peter Sloterdijk. Eduardo was a fellow at Durham’s IAS in 2009. I remember a New York lunch with Eduardo, Neil Brenner and Stephen Graham clearly, a dinner in Atlanta with him, and many other meetings.

His books include Global Fragments: Globalizations, Latinamericanisms, and Critical Theory (SUNY Press, 2007), and most recently The Philosophical Animal: On Zoopoetics and Interspecies Cosmopolitanism (SUNY Press, 2024 – open access). The last chapter of The Philosophical Animal is an extraordinary story of some of his formative experiences. He translated work by Enrique Dussel and Karl-Otto Apel, published interviews with Jürgen Habermas, Richard Rorty and Angela Davis, and so much more. His contributions to a wider knowledge of Latin American philosophy and his support of students received due recognition in his lifetime, and in the tributes now. 

My condolences to his family and colleagues, and other friends.