The Latin American Mind

A history of ideas by the Mexican philosopher, first published in 1949 and translated into English in 1963 by James H. Abbott and Lowell Dunham. Zea studies the two stages of thought that followed independence from Spain: romanticism and then positivism. His thesis is that political independence was not enough; Spanish American thinkers wanted a 'mental emancipation' from the colonial past, which they identified with Spain, the Church and scholastic habits of mind. Moving from mental emancipation to positivism as the philosophy of a new order, through figures such as Sarmiento and Alberdi in Argentina and Bilbao and Lastarria in Chile, he shows how European philosophies were adopted as tools for building new nations, educating citizens and justifying order and progress. He argues that these borrowed ideas were changed by the problems they were meant to solve, and that the attempt simply to erase the past left a lasting sense of dependence. The book became a model for reading Latin American philosophy through its own history.

It shows how imported philosophies were remade to fit Latin American needs, and it launched Zea's lifelong argument that the region's history of ideas is itself a philosophical subject.