Intellectual Justice and Historical Recognition

For centuries, Sor Juana's works were minimized, misinterpreted, or attributed to male colleagues; contemporary scholarship has had to undertake the work of intellectual justice by properly naming her genius and restoring her legacy. This concept examines how justice requires not just material redistribution but epistemic recognition—the acknowledgment of who knows what and who has contributed to human understanding. Intellectual justice means crediting indigenous knowledge systems, women thinkers, and non-Western philosophers by name rather than erasing them into anonymous tradition. It requires historians and scholars to actively restore the names of those whose contributions have been obscured by power dynamics. Across cultures, this work is ongoing: recovering the intellectual histories of colonized peoples, naming women philosophers whose work was attributed to men, acknowledging the epistemological contributions of marginalized communities. This is not mere historical accuracy; it is a matter of justice because knowledge and naming are inseparable. When we fail to name intellectual contributors, we perpetuate the very erasures and hierarchies that produced injustice in the first place. Intellectual justice restores names to ideas and people to history.