Introduction
Geographical connotations of philosophy are notoriously a quite delicate and controversial issue, since philosophy is considered as a universal discipline, or even as a specific kind of investigation characterized by a certain intellectual style (that might be equated with a critical comparison of rational arguments) and also
This paper was supported by the Research Project FF12012-33998, from the Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness of Spain.
L. Velazquez (*)
Faculty of Bioethics, Universidad Anahuac, Huixquilucan, Mexico e-mail: luluvela@prodigy.net.mx
L. Velazquez
Universidad Pontificia de Mexico, Mexico City, Mexico
© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2015
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M. Alai et al. (eds.), Science Between Truth and Ethical Responsibility, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-16369-7_18 by a certain list of fundamental problems, that constitute the subject matter of its recognized branches. Therefore, what really counts in philosophy seems to be the accurate delineation of a given issue, its careful analysis, the evaluation of the arguments advanced in order to defend or oppose certain solutions, and all this independently of the individual thinkers who have concretely proposed these doctrines or pieces of doctrine. Their names are often mentioned as a kind of mnemonic tool, more or less in the same way as we associate a proper name to a given theorem in mathematics or to a certain law in physics (speaking, for example, of the “theorem of Euclid” or the “law of Ohm”). If already the name of the individual person seems of little interest, even less important should appear his/her nationality. All this may be true, but on the other hand when we move our consideration from what we could call “systematic philosophy” to the history of philosophy, we immediately realize the paramount importance of linking philosophical ideas and doctrines with particular persons, institutions, cultural environments and traditions.
In particular we find perfectly natural to speak, for instance, of a French philosophy (in which we include thinkers such as Descartes, Comte, Bergson, Sartre and Ricoeur) distinct from a German philosophy (in which we include Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, Nietzsche, Husserl, Heidegger), without excluding by this that the thought of a certain philosopher might have been influenced by that of a different philosophical tradition (like Sartre’s existentialism, e.g., with regard to Husserl and Heidegger). Of course, there are cases in which such a national attribution is problematic for different reasons (e.g. because a philosopher has emigrated to a country different from his own original one and has even acquired a new citizenship), but, as usual, exceptions do not eliminate a rule.What are, hence, the conditions that justify the recognition of a national or regional philosophy? It does not seem reasonable to reduce them to a pure contingent matter of fact, such as that of being taught at Mexican rather than French, German or Italian universities (indeed, it is likely that the contents of such teaching are quite similar, or that an excellent specialist, e.g., in German philosophy is a professor at a Japanese university). For a similar reason it would not be sensible to make the national attribution strictly dependent on the nationality of a given philosopher, not only owing to the already mentioned cases of change of nationality, but also to the more substantial fact that a thinker may have contributed significantly to the philosophy of a country very different from his own original one (think e.g. of Levinas, who has certainly greatly contributed to contemporary French philosophy but was born in Lituania). In order to significantly speak of a “regional” philosophy we must be able to single out not a whole bulk or a system of doctrines but at least a few original contributions that were proposed within the context of a certain country or geographic region and developed as efforts for answering certain cultural issues typical of that region, in such a way as to consti- tute—if not a school in a proper sense—at least a rather well defined and recognizable community of intellectuals and a tradition of research. In the case of Latin America we can affirm that such conditions were realized.
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