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The Novohispanic nun Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz has not been traditionally considered as a philosopher within the Anglophone philosophical sphere because her writings are primarily poems and plays. In the last three decades, only a few philosophers have engaged with Sor Juana's works. However, their scholarship has focused only on a narrow range of issues, such as Sor Juana's defense of the right of women to be educated, and has neglected other dimensions of her thought, such as her position on selfcontrol. In this study, I argue that, in contraposition to traditional interpretations of Sor Juana's views on selfcontrol offered by Octavio Paz and Anna More, it is better to read her as adopting a stance on self-control that prefigures a position recently adopted by Al Mele (who distinguishes having self-control from being self-controlled). In particular, I show that the interpretation that I propose is better than the others I discuss because it fits better Sor Juana's apologetic goals. 1 | INTRODUCTION The Novohispanic nun Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz was one of the most outstanding intellects of the last stage of the "Spanish Golden Age." Not only was she a talented playwright and poet in the gongorismo tradition, 1 but she was also a brilliant philosopher of the Early Modern period, who has been until recently overlooked in the Anglophone philosophical sphere. 2 In particular, she is remarkable for having penned the "Respuesta a Sor Filotea de la Cruz" (The Answer; [1691], 2009), a letter with an apologetic bent to Manuel de Santa Cruz, bishop of Puebla (who wrote under the pseudonym "Sor Filotea" to chastise her for her "mundane" activities), where she defends her intellectual endeavors and argues for the right of (at least some) women to be formally educated. Though the work of Sor Juana has attracted in the last three decades the interest of some contemporary philosophers who have analyzed how she articulates feminist themes and deploys different strategies to defend her literary ventures (e.g., Femenías, 2005; O'Neill 1998), there are various areas in Sor Juana's thought that remain unexplored or, if they have been

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