Samuel Ramos

Samuel Ramos was a Mexican philosopher who taught at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). Influenced by José Ortega y Gasset and by Alfred Adler's psychology, he wrote Profile of Man and Culture in Mexico, a pioneering philosophical study of Mexican identity that diagnosed an inferiority complex rooted in colonial history and imitation of Europe. The book opened a long tradition of reflection on lo mexicano and on the possibility of an authentic national culture.

Key ideas

• Philosophy should reflect on one's own historical and cultural circumstance.
• A culture that imitates foreign models without assimilating them lives inauthentically.
• Mexican culture showed an inferiority complex that could be understood and overcome.
• A new humanism should restore the whole human person against mechanisation.

Major works

• Profile of Man and Culture in Mexico (El perfil del hombre y la cultura en México, 1934)
• Hacia un nuevo humanismo (1940)
• Historia de la filosofía en México (1943)

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