Name Tina Botts Region Western philosophy | ||
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Main interests Philosophy of LawHermeneuticsPhilosophy of RaceFeminist PhilosophyEthicsSocial & Political PhilosophyHistory of Philosophy School Analytic philosophy, Continental philosophy | ||
Tina Fernandes Botts is Chair of the American Philosophical Association’s Committee on the Status of Black Philosophers and a Visiting Professor of Philosophy at Oberlin College. Previously, she was a Fellow in Law and Philosophy & Lecturer in Philosophy and Legal Theory at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor; and an Assistant Professor of Philosophy and Faculty Associate and Area Leader in Public Policy and Diversity at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. Botts is known for her work in legal hermeneutics, intersectionality, and mixed race studies.
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Education and career
Botts earned her Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Memphis under the supervision of Thomas Nenon and Bill Lawson, her J.D. from Rutgers School of Law Camden under the supervision of Dennis Patterson, and her B.A. in philosophy with a minor in physics from the University of Maryland at College Park. Her work is inter-traditional (analytic, continental) interdisciplinary (philosophy, law), and grounded in the history of philosophy (ancient, modern).
Research areas
Botts' research areas are philosophy of law, philosophical hermeneutics, philosophy of race, feminist philosophy, ethical theory, applied ethics, and the history of philosophy. Her scholarship centers on the reexamination of laws and other paradigms (ethical, social, political, metaphysical, and epistemological) from the vantage point of the marginalized and oppressed, particularly racialized minority groups. Where a given paradigm is found lacking, Botts advocates alternative approaches or paradigm shifts designed to more fully respect these populations. The suggested paradigm shifts are grounded in insights obtained from philosophical hermeneutics, critical legal theory, and general themes in metaphysics and epistemology as found in the history of philosophy. Key to Botts’ research is the hermeneutical insight that there is an intimate connection between what we take things to be (e.g., a race) and what we take things to mean (e.g., a law), and that both are heavily influenced by what Heidegger called “being-in-the-world,” that is, by context, history, social forces, and the identity of the knower and/or the perceiver of reality.