APA Newsletters
Spring 2000
Volume 99, Number 2

Newsletter on Hispanic/Latino Issues in Philosophy

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Crossing the Borders of Philosophy

Some Thoughts on the 14th Interamerican Congress

Manuel Vargas
Stanford University
mvargas@csli.stanford.edu

Crossing the border into another country frequently carries with it the expectation that things will be different and maybe unexpected. It was in this spirit that I went to Mexico this past summer as part of an ongoing research project on Latin American philosophy.1 What I found was distinctive, but less unusual than I had hoped. Despite some obvious and not-so-obvious differences in the practice of philosophy in Latin American and the United States, the trip confirmed that philosophical divisions based on approach, language, and nationality remain as entrenched as they were in 1943 when Brand Blanshard said that of "the Latin American mind, of its dominant interests and ideas, of its guiding convictions about religion and society, even of its leading exponents in literature and science and philosophy, most of us must confess that we know almost nothing."2

The focus of my trip was the 14th Interamerican Congress of Philosophy, held in the city of Puebla, Mexico, from August 16–20.3 Philosophers from Canada to Argentina made the Congress genuinely American in the best sense of the word. Meeting in nearly 200 different panels over five days, philosophers delivered papers on an impressively broad range of topics. Animated philosophical conversation was to be found in and around the site of the Congress, and many were clearly enjoying the opportunity to get caught up with friends from other countries. As impressive was the wider social embeddedness of the conference. There was mention of the Congress in a local newspaper, people seemed to walk in off the street to listen to a few talks (and once, during a plenary session, to beg for money from the panelists), and political campaigning in the form of leaflets announcing the impending visit of a presidential candidate all made their way into the happenings of the Congress. In addition, a surprisingly large number of high school and college students was present at the talks, diluting the density of professional philosophers one can be accustomed to seeing at philosophy conferences in the United States. All of these things gave the Puebla conference a very distinctive feel.

The most obvious way in which the Congress was philosophically different from an Anglophone philosophy conference could be found in the diversity of Latin American philosophical approaches represented at the Congress. Anglophone categories of analytic and Continental philosophy are too crude to capture even the main differences in Latin American philosophical pursuits. "Culturalists" inspired by the work of Leopoldo Zea, Liberation philosophy, analytic philosophy, Marxists, German axiological and phenomenological schools, Frankfurt School Critical Theory, and history of philosophy were all well represented at the Puebla.4 Although these divisions were a reminder of the philosophical possibilities available in Latin America, the diversity of intellectual programs also seemed to come at an occasional cost. First, it was apparent that many philosophers did not make an effort to speak across the intellectual divisions, just as analytic and Continental philosophers in the U.S. rarely attempt to find points of contact. Even worse, though, was that many talks were marked by an absence of the "depth" one expects to find in places with more unified research programs. For instance, in talks on sessions specifically designated as "Latin American Philosophy" there was an excess of time spent on taxonomies of philosophical programs and too little time spent on developing particular lines of argument or illustrating why some particular Latin American made a worthwhile contribution to philosophical thought. If one were to judge things in virtue of the content of talks in these panels, it would appear that one of the major research programs in Latin American philosophy is cataloguing its own internal divisions.

Of course, the panels on "Latin American Philosophy" were not exhaustive of discussions on or by Latin American philosophers. Other panels were more philosophically active and reflected ongoing debates internal to their own approaches. The panels on Liberation Philosophy seemed to have little concern with taxonomies or catalogues of broad philosophical divisions. Instead, these panels typically focused on topics like globalization or either criticisms or rehabilitation of specific philosophical positions. The same was true of panels on philosophy of law and political theory. In these panels, papers and the subsequent discussions were nearly always directed at working out or raising some particular philosophical problem. So while the lack of "depth" was clear in some panels, it would be a mistake to ascribe it to all panels that might sensibly be grouped under the title ‘Latin American philosophy’.

Beyond the internal divisions present in Latin American philosophy, the single most notable division at the conference was a linguistic one. Inevitable though it was, philosophers brought their linguistic borders with them, and sometimes in unexpected ways. Prima facie, one might expect that a major philosophy conference in Latin America would be overwhelmingly in Spanish or Portuguese, depending on where it was held. While it was certainly the case that the majority of talks were in Spanish, an English-speaking, Spanish-impaired speaker could have attended a sizable number of the sessions of the Congress. English, no doubt for nonphilosophical reasons, has clearly become an international language of philosophy, surpassing French and German in its pervasiveness, at least in the Western philosophical community.

Despite the ubiquity of English, language nonetheless served to identify borders between philosophical communities in the Americas. Anglophone philosophers who worked outside traditional topics in Latin American philosophy typically manifested no urge to speak in Spanish, readily presenting in English. Sometimes the English orientation of these sessions had no effect on the audience. Talks in the philosophy of language and mind were attended primarily by philosophers who had, whatever their country of origin, received graduate training in the U.S. or England. The expectation in these sessions seemed to be that the technical work of analytic philosophy ought to be carried out in English.5 In larger sessions, however, this practice lead to different results. As soon as it became clear that the talks of a plenary session were going to be in English, a mass exodus of observers would begin.

There were some notable exceptions to the creeping linguistic colonialism of the conference. For instance, Larry Lauden’s (philosophy of science) plenary talk was in Spanish, to the obvious pleasure of the audience and adjoining panelists. Richard Schmitt also delivered a paper in Spanish. Many Anglophones working on topics in Latin American philosophy would speak in Spanish, sometimes translate on the fly, or at least apologize profusely for an inability to speak in Spanish. For this group, there was a clear sense that philosophy, at least for this conference, ought to be carried out in Spanish as much as possible.

Beyond the understandable preference for talks in one’s own language, there was a notable asymmetry in interest that tracked geopolitical status. U.S. and Canadian philosophers only rarely attended panels that were predominantly composed of Latin American philosophers while Latin American philosophers were frequently at panels made up of mainly or all Anglo-American philosophers. So while Larry Lauden proved to be a big draw for both Latin American and Anglo-American philosophers, Leopoldo Zea’s appearance drew only a smattering of Anglo-American philosophers. What Samuel Gluck wrote about the fifth Inter-American Congress was true of the most recent incarnation of the Congress: "Many more of our Latin American colleagues attended ‘our’ meetings than we did ‘theirs.’"6

There were some isolated successes at cross-cultural philosophical dialog. The North-South dialog panels seemed to grab the attention of mainly Latin Americans but there was a notable presence of Anglo-American, though not analytic, philosophers at these panels. Also, panels in the Philosophy of Liberation seemed to have a broader appeal, perhaps because of Enrique Dussel’s various visiting professorships in the U.S. and the interest his work has for philosophers interested in post-Colonial studies and theories of globalization. In general, however, there seemed to be little cross-fertilization going on between traditions. Analytic philosophers talked only to analytic philosophers about analytic topics, and Latin Americans working on ontology gave papers for fellow Latin American ontologists.

Given the general lack of linguistic and philosophical border crossing, is there a point to having a specifically Interamerican Congress? It is not obvious that there is, at least not as long as philosophical, national, and linguistic divisions are treated as largely unpassable borders between distinct and autonomous philosophical enterprises.7

Notes

1. My research was very generously funded by the Center for Latin American Studies at Stanford University.

2. Brand Blanshard, "First Inter-American Conference: Opening Remarks by the Chairman," Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Vol. 4, No. 2, Dec. 1943, pp.178–9.

3. The Congress also served as the 10th Mexican National Congress of Philosophy.

4. Notably, there was limited French philosophy or "theory" at the Congress, although talks by Reyes Mate and Raúl Fornet-Betancourt were exceptions.

5. There was a brief discussion of this expectation in a panel on North-South dialog, where a Latin American audience member bemoaned the fact that he wished to do philosophical work in Spanish but felt as though he had to use English to do any technical work. It was not clear whether the pressure he felt was philosophical, terminological, habitual, or social-recognitional in origin.

6. Samuel Gluck "Report on the Fifth Inter-American Congress of Philosophy," Journal of Philosophy, Vol. LIV, No. 21, Oct. 10, 1957, p 633.

7. Thanks are due to Eduardo Mendieta for suggestions and comments on this report.

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APA Newsletters Spring 2000 Volume 99, Number 2

APA Newsletters
Spring 2000
Volume 99, Number 2