Identity and the Capacity for Truth

Sor Juana lived in a society that insisted women were intellectually inferior by nature—a belief used to justify excluding them from education and authority. Through her own scholarship, she disproved this claim empirically and philosophically. She argued that the capacity for truth is human, not gendered, classed, or racialized. This insight aligns with what every civilization eventually discovers: fairness requires abandoning the fiction that identity determines intellect. Sor Juana's framework applies across contexts: slavery was justified by claims that certain races lacked full reason; caste systems relied on the belief that birth determined capacity; gender discrimination assumes women cannot master complex knowledge. The Periagoge principle here is that fairness demands we judge people's capacity for understanding by their actual engagement with ideas, not by categories assigned at birth. Her life and work remain powerful evidence that civilizations claiming to value truth while denying education to entire groups are simply contradicting themselves, and that real fairness requires equalizing access to the intellectual development that reveals our shared human capacity for reason.