Tina Fernandes Botts


Tina Fernandes Botts is an American assistant professor of philosophy at California State University, Fresno. She is known for her work in legal hermeneutics, intersectionality, feminist philosophy, and philosophy of race. She is the former chair of the American Philosophical Association's Committee on the Status of Black Philosophers.
Previous posts include visiting assistant professor of philosophy at Oberlin College; fellow in law and philosophy at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor; and assistant professor of philosophy, and faculty associate and area leader in public policy and diversity, at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.

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 interdisciplinary, and grounded in the history of philosophy.

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 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 and what we take things to mean, 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.

Awards and fellowships