Is There a Philosophy in Our America?

A short book by the Peruvian philosopher, published in Mexico in 1968, that asks whether Spanish America has produced an original philosophy. It opens with a survey of philosophy in the region from colonial scholasticism through the Enlightenment, romanticism, positivism and the twentieth-century reaction against positivism. It then reviews the debate over whether a distinctively Latin American philosophy exists. Salazar Bondy's own answer is largely negative: the region's philosophy has been imitative and receptive, made of borrowed systems, with little original contribution and a gap between philosophers and their societies. He traces this defect not to individual talent but to underdevelopment and dependence, calling it the product of a culture of domination. An authentic philosophy is still possible, he concludes, if thought takes this condition as its problem and becomes a tool for overcoming it. Leopoldo Zea answered the book in 1969, and the exchange helped give rise to the philosophy of liberation.

It poses the sharpest version of the question every Latin American philosopher has had to face, and ties the authenticity of thought to economic and cultural dependence.