Las Meditaciones suramericanas del Conde de Keyserling. Su impronta en la filosofía de lo mexicano

el objetivo es revisar las principales tesis del Conde de Keyserling en las Meditaciones suramericanas (1933) y demostrar su influencia en dos pensadores mexicanos: Samuel Ramos y Emilio Uranga. Tiene la doble originalidad de reivindicar a Keyserling como pieza clave para comprenderel proceso de “germanización” de la filosofía mexicana durante los años veinte y treinta del siglo pasado, y de rastrear por primera vez la influencia de nociones keyserlinguianas como “hombre telúrico”, “mundo abisal” y “gana” en los análisis sobre la finura y la desgana del mexicano.Se concluye que esta influencia no fue accesoria, sino decisiva, y que no se limitó a México. Por décadas, Keyserling alimentó el imaginario de filósofos y novelistas de toda Latinoamérica. El artículo adopta el presupuesto metodológico del historicismo: “una idea no viene a ser sino la forma de reacción de un determinado hombre frente a sus circunstancias”.Palabras clave: Keyserling; Meditaciones suramericanas; Filosofía de lo mexicano; Samuel Ramos; Emilio Uranga.Abstract: The purpose of this article is to review Keyserling’s main philosophical ideas and categories in his South American Meditations (published in German in 1932), and show the major influence they had on Mexican thinkers such as Samuel Ramos and Emilio Uranga. This articlesvindicates the important role of Keyserling in the “Germanization” of Mexican Philosophy in the first half of the past century, and traces for the first time the presence of some Keyserling’s notions(“hombre telúrico”, “mundo abisal”, “gana”) in the characterization of the Mexican as delicate and unwilling. This influence was decisive and spread throughout Latin America. Historicism provides the methodological assumption that an idea (even a philosophical one) is nothing but a way a concrete human being deals with her circumstances.Key words: Keyserling; South American Meditations; Mexican Philosophy; Samuel Ramos; Emilio Uranga.

Mexican Existentialist Ethics and the Pragmatic Authenticity of Rodolfo Usigli's El gesticulador

This article explores the genesis of Mexican literary existentialism in Usigli’s 1938 play, El gesticulador. It elucidates various key drives of Mexican existentialism from Usigli’s moment onward and situates Usigli’s literary existentialism within those drives. In so doing, the essay articulates the deeply-rooted ethical bent of a Mexican existentialism forged in the orbit of identity discourse. It argues that Usigli’s morally equivocal drama makes unexpected common cause with that bent: dynamically conjugating stagecraft, Mexican philosophy, and post-revolutionary politics, El gesticulador advances a pragmatic authenticity based on altruism, communitarianism, and principles over Truth.

Gloria Anzaldúa’s Mexican Genealogy: From Pelados and Pachucos to New Mestizas

This essay examines Gloria Anzaldúa’s critical appropriation of two Mexican philosophers in the writing of Borderlands/La Frontera: Samuel Ramos and Octavio Paz. We argue that although neither of these authors is cited in her seminal work, Anzaldúa had them both in mind through the writing process and that their ideas are present in the text itself. Through a genealogical reading of Borderlands/La Frontera, and aided by archival research, we demonstrate how Anzaldúa’s philosophical vision of the “new mestiza” is a critical continuation of the broader tradition known as la filosofía de lo mexicano, which flourished during a golden age of Mexican philosophy (1910–1960). Our aim is to open new directions in Latinx and Latin American philosophy by presenting Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera as a profound scholarly encounter with two classic works of Mexican philosophy, Ramos’ Profile of Man and Culture in Mexico and Paz’s The Labyrinth of Solitude.

The Philosophy of Accidentality

In mid-twentieth-century Mexican philosophy, there was a peculiar nationalist existentialist project focused on the cultural conditions of agency. This article revisits some of those ideas, including the idea that there is an important but underappreciated experience of one's relationship to norms and social meanings. This experience—something called accidentality—casts new light on various forms of social subordination and socially scaffolded agency, including cultural alienation, biculturality, and double consciousness.

La visión de Carmen Rovira sobre la filosofía mexicana

The main purpose of this paper is to interpret the main contributions of Carmen Rovira to the study of the historical development of Mexican philosophy in its hermeneutical aspects as well as in the rescue and interpretation of the original works of Mexican philosophers since the XVI Century. In first place I analyze her hermeneutical methodology for the history of Mexican philosophy that highlights the importance of interactions between texts and contexts. Secondly, I refer to the archives rescue made by Carmen Rovira to reconstruct a Mexican philosophical corpus, especially for XIX and XX centuries. But the most relevant ofCarmen Rovira’s philosophical work is her original and critical interpretations of Mexican and Iberoamerican works, both from colonial and independent period. The most outstanding thesis of these interpretations is that during the colonial epoch Mexican philosophy was determinant for the construction of an idea of authentic nation that was very important for Mexican independence in the first decades of Nineteenth Century. Unfortunately, after Mexican independence the great cultural and political relevance of Mexican philosophydecayed. The most outstanding contribution of Carmen Rovira is precisely to recover the cultural and political relevance of philosophy in present Mexico.

Mexican Philosophy in the 20th Century

Sánchez and Sanchez have selected, edited, translated, and written an introduction to some of the most influential texts in 20th century Mexican philosophy. Together, these texts reveal and give shape to a unique and robust tradition that will certainly challenge and complicate traditional conceptions of philosophy. The texts collected here are organized chronologically and represent a period of Mexican thought and culture that emerges out of the Mexican Revolution of 1910 and cultimates in la filosofía de lo mexicano (the philosophy of Mexicanness), which reached its peak in the 1950s. Though the selections respond to a variety of philosophical questions and themes and will be of interest to a wide range of readers, they represent a tendency to take seriously the question of Mexican national identity as a philosophical question—an issue that is complicated by Mexico’s indigenous and European ancestries, its history of colonialism, and its growing dependency on foreign money and culture. More than an attempt simply to describe the national character, however, the texts gathered here represent an optimistic period in Mexican philosophy that aimed to affirm Mexican philosophy as a valuable, if not urgent, contribution to universal thought and culture.

Two Ideas of Philosophy (1940)

The question concerning the possibility of a Mexican or Spanish-American philosophy, an important issue for Gaos, sounds metaphilosophical, but in this debate, Larroyo dismisses the idea of metaphilosophy as an absurdity, which is either a contradiction in terms or leads to an infinite regress. For Larroyo, the task of defining philosophy is as old as philosophy itself and does not require the “new” discipline of metaphilosophy. This selection illustrates how questions about the definition and scope of philosophy were increasingly becoming a subject of public debate, thus contributing to the normalization of philosophy. Questions regarding whether philosophy is a science, as Larroyo thought, or a personal confession, as Gaos thought, or whether the essence of the psychology of the philosopher is arrogance or humility are relevant not only to the possibility of Mexican philosophy, but also to determinations of the value or relevance of philosophy in Mexican society at large.

La filosofía en México en el siglo XX: un breve informe

The author presents a report, writing in the 90's and unpublished in Spanish, which could be of use for the current discussion on Mexican philosophy. In this report, Pereda divides the history of Mexican philosophy in 4 phases: "the generation of founders", the "transterrados" or exiled, "the epoch of great blocks", and the "irruption of archipelago".