Latin America as a Historico-Philosophical Relation

Abstract

LATIN AMERICA AND PHILOSOPHY SEEM STRANGE, EVEN UNCOMFORTABLE bedfellows. This is perhaps because the predication that naturally follows—that of a "Latin American philosophy," or perhaps of a "philosophy of Latin America"—seems inseparable from a prior doubt whether such a thing really does, or could, exist. As the Chilean philosopher Iván Jaksic has written, "the question as to the existence of a Latin American philosophy is rhetorical, given that it is posed most frequently by those who already desire to affirm it." 1 Although no one can doubt for an instant the existence of Latin American philosophers or of Latin Americans (and Latin Americanists) who philosophize, the notion that the resulting philosophy is more than accidentally "Latin American" is less than certain. Still, to deny the existence of a Latin American philosophy seems itself no less in danger of becoming rhetorical, in danger of falling back onto what was already simply the desire to deny something because of its strangeness to the intellectual ear.