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Salazar Bondy asked if there is a philosophy of our America. Over fifty years on, what’s the answer?

Mateo Quispe Fellow
· 6 replies
Society & cultureLatin AmericanPhilosophy of liberationAugusto Salazar BondyLeopoldo Zea#authenticity#dependence#latin-american-philosophy#philosophy-without-qualification
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In 1968, the Peruvian philosopher Augusto Salazar Bondy published a short book with an uncomfortable title: ¿Existe una filosofía de nuestra América? His answer was, roughly, not yet. Latin American philosophy, he argued, had been imitative: each generation importing the latest European school, scholasticism, then positivism, then phenomenology, without producing original thought. And he gave a reason: a culture under conditions of dependence and domination produces an inauthentic philosophy, because it cannot think from its own situation.

The Mexican philosopher Leopoldo Zea replied the next year, in a book whose title is its thesis: La filosofía americana como filosofía sin más, American philosophy as philosophy without qualification. For Zea, Latin Americans had been doing philosophy all along, reflecting on their own circumstances with whatever tools they had. Importing tools does not make the thinking derivative. Europe imported Greek tools too.

Most readers I know side with Zea on dignity and with Salazar Bondy on diagnosis. The philosophy of liberation, Dussel above all, took Salazar Bondy's link between dependence and thought and tried to build from it.

I'd like to discuss whether the question even makes sense now. Is ‘authentic’ philosophy a coherent idea, or a nationalism of thought? And does the same debate look different from Africa, India or the Arab world?

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6 replies

  1. Valentina Ríos

    Fellow

    From Mexico: I side with Zea, but Sor Juana complicates it. She wrote in the scholastic forms of her day, imported entirely, and used them to argue something no European had argued in quite that way about a woman's right to learn. Original thought often arrives in borrowed forms. Salazar Bondy's test of authenticity seems to look at the clothes, not the body.

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  2. Khady Sène

    Fellow

    From Dakar, the parallel is almost exact. Hountondji's critique of ethnophilosophy and Salazar Bondy's critique of imitation are mirror images: one warns against inventing a collective philosophy to prove you have one, the other warns against borrowing an individual one to prove you're modern. Both are asking what it would mean to think from where you are.

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  3. Andrés Zuluaga

    Fellow

    Seen from Colombia, Salazar Bondy's link between dependence and thought holds up empirically. When I hear our public debates, the frameworks are almost always borrowed: transitional justice from international NGOs, human rights from Geneva. Sometimes they fit. Sometimes victims say things for which no imported category exists. That's where I'd look for an authentic philosophy, not in seminar rooms.

  4. Ana Clara Ferreira

    Fellow

    Brazil gives one counterexample to the imitation charge: in logic, Newton da Costa's work on paraconsistent logic in the 1950s and 60s was original by any standard and shaped the international field. Nobody called it ‘Latin American logic’. Maybe that's Zea's point: when it's good, it's just philosophy.

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    1. Mateo Quispe

      Fellow

      Ana Clara, that's a lovely example, and it sharpens the question: da Costa's logic is original but not about our situation. Salazar Bondy wanted a philosophy that grows out of the experience of domination. I think both are needed, and the mistake is making either the test of the other.

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  5. Emeka Anyaoha

    Fellow

    From Lagos, the question I'd ask is who is the audience. A philosophy is ‘derivative’ partly because the people judging it read it in Paris or Oxford. If Latin American philosophers were mainly read by one another, debating each other's work, would the question of authenticity even come up?

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