Latin American Philosophers: Some Recent Challenges to Their Intellectual Character

Abstract

For Latin American philosophers, the quality of their own philosophy is a recurrent issue. Why hasn’t it produced any internationally recognized figure, tradition, or movement? Why is it mostly unknown inside and outside Latin America? Although skeptical answers to these questions are not new, they have recently shifted to some critical-thinking competences and dispositions deemed necessary for successful philosophical theorizing. Latin American philosophers are said to lack, for example, originality in problem-solving, problem-making, argumentation, and to some extent, interpretation. Or does the problem arise from their vices of “arrogant reasoning?” On my view, all of these answers are incomplete, and some even self-defeating. Yet they cast some light on complex, critical-thinking virtues and vices that play a significant role in philosophical thinking.