Aztec Philosophy: Understanding a World in Motion by James Maffie is an impressive text dedicated to the exploration of ancient Náhuatl-speaking societies’ (or Aztec’s) epistemological approach to nature, the cosmos, and reality itself. Using a multidisciplinary approach to lay out his theories, Maffie threads together an inventive and inspiring text that covers fields as diverse as Mesoamerican studies and comparative philosophy, and offers ethnic, performance, and religious studies much-valuable historiographic and anthropological material to enrich their content. Through a systematic problematizing of established interpretations of Náhuatl-speaking people’s ritual practices, Aztec Philosophy asserts that a people hitherto considered savage practiced a sophisticated and highly ritualistic spirituality and possessed a complex philosophic worldview.
Organized into eight meticulously researched chapters, Aztec Philosophy arrives as a welcomed counterweight to the prevalent perception of ancient Aztecs as distant, primitive, and bloodthirsty. The text concentrates on expressions of large civic religious practices, such as the primarily...
