Abstract: Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (1648-1695) was a novohispanic nun who composed several poems, plays, and essays. Though still relatively unknown, there is increasing philosophical attention to her work and its contribution and relevance to feminism, early modern thought, and colonialism. My aim is to contribute to this growing literature by arguing that Sor Juana deployed her own theory of reasoning as a tool of epistemic resistance against oppressors. Laura Benítez (2019) has recently shown the Thomistic influence in Sor Juana's epistemology, especially her theories of sensibility and understanding. José Medina (2013) uses Sor Juana as a case study in epistemic resistance. My paper builds on both of these analyses of Sor Juana. I do this in two parts.

In the first part, by drawing Sor Juana's Respuesta a Sor Filotea de la Cruz (Respuesta) and on Benítez's Thomistic insights, I provide an interpretation of what reasoning was for Sor Juana. In particular, I argue that Sor Juana believed reason was a genderless ability (Vargas 2022) because at minimum, for her, reasoning was a process of abstraction and compounding. I then also explain how, for Sor Juana, these two processes together with imagination and sensation (faculties of the "vegetative" and "sensitive" parts of the human soul), result in more complex reasoning, such as analogical and non-deductive inferences. In the second part, I show that Medina's attribution of counterfactual thinking and imaginative resistance fit into Sor Juana's general theory of reasoning. Based on this, together with her Loa to El Divino Narciso and her Respuesta, I argue that she used this theory of reasoning as way to contend against and thus resist sexist and colonialist beliefs toward women and indigenous peoples. Lastly, I entertain an objection based on Lisa Shapiro's (2022) interpretation of the role of affection in reason for Sor Juana.