Francisco Plaza

FACULTY FELLOW

Francisco Plaza, PhD

My name is Francisco E. Plaza, I have a PhD in Philosophy from the University of St. Thomas in Houston, Texas. My dissertation work centers on Jacques Maritain’s philosophy of culture, and how it applies to politics in our time. I have had a number of publications on the subject, notably, my article “Subjectivity and the Prise de Conscience in Jacques Maritain” published by the American Maritain Association in Engaging the Times (2017), and “Maritain’s Philosophy of Culture: A Bridge between Metaphysics and Politics” published in In Search for Harmony (2019). My primary research interests are political theory, ethics, and the culture of modernity.

I am originally from Caracas, Venezuela, and having experienced first-hand the transition from the Democratic state it once was to the totalitarian state it is today, I became invested in political philosophy and, in particular, the crisis of modern culture. One of the main questions I sought to answer was how people could continue to support failed political ideologies even in the face of obvious problems created by their adoption (e.g. an exponential increase of poverty and crime, clear human rights abuse on the part of the government, rampant fear and despair in the culture, an undeniable removal of basic liberties, etc.). The work of thinkers like Jacques Maritain, Eric Voegelin, and Pope Saint John Paul II, helped me to understand the genesis of this problem, as well as how it may be resolved. In our time, we face an anthropological crisis of meaning within our culture, and this is primarily what I hope to address in my own work.