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Anti-positivist thought in Latin America

DOI
10.4324/9780415249126-ZA002-1
DOI: 10.4324/9780415249126-ZA002-1
Version: v1,  Published online: 1998
Retrieved March 29, 2024, from https://www.rep.routledge.com/articles/thematic/anti-positivist-thought-in-latin-america/v-1

Article Summary

Anti-positivist philosophy arose in Latin America at the turn of the twentieth century in response to the dominance of closed positivistic systems of historical development in the climate of intellectual opinion. Argentina, Mexico and Uruguay were all centres of anti-positivist theorizing. Philosophers such as Mexicans Antonio Caso and José Vasconcelos, the Argentinian Alejandro Korn and the Uruguayan Carlos Vaz Ferreira attacked Auguste Comte’s positivism, as well as deterministic forms of scientific Marxism and Herbert Spencer’s social Darwinism for their denials of creative freedom and spiritual values. Latin American anti-positivism is characterized as a form of modernism although it incorporates elements of traditionalism. It is self-consciously critical of the limitations of modern progressivism and willing to supplement the modern paradigm with premodern discourses. Anti-positivist philosophy is also firmly committed to the modern embrace of process over fixed form.

Latin American anti-positivism is founded in a comprehensive interpretation of experience that embraces phenomena such as creative freedom, tentative and experimental thinking, imaginative coordination and charitable love. These aspects are excluded from the purview of what positivists allow to be objects of scientific knowledge. Anti-positivists interpret experience as a bi-polar struggle in which the free side of life battles to prevail over the forces of necessity, system, abstraction and egoism.

South American anti-positivists concentrated on issues of knowledge and the structure of thought and experience, whereas Mexican anti-positivists, who were products of a formal education modelled on Comte’s prescriptions, undertook a more total revolt. This revolt had metaphysical, moral and political dimensions.

For the most part anti-positivists did not fully escape the doctrines they criticized. They took from these doctrines descriptions of unredeemed, degraded and mechanized life which they opposed to redemptive practices of struggle.

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Citing this article:
Weinstein, Michael A.. Anti-positivist thought in Latin America, 1998, doi:10.4324/9780415249126-ZA002-1. Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Taylor and Francis, https://www.rep.routledge.com/articles/thematic/anti-positivist-thought-in-latin-america/v-1.
Copyright © 1998-2024 Routledge.

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