The first half of the twentieth century saw the peak of the worldwide influence of John Dewey (1859–1952), and by midcentury there was a sharp decline in his influence both at home and abroad. However, during the last two decades there has been a renewed interest in pragmatism in general and in Dewey in particular. Although separate studies have been published on Dewey’s influence in a number of countries, only passing mention has been made of Spain and Latin America. This essay is an effort to begin to fill that gap.¹ The first part is a historical survey of...

The starting point of pragmatism in Brazil occurred through John Dewey’s works; his works that are best known by Brazilians are those that address educational topics. For this reason, during most of the twentieth century pragmatism and Dewey were considered synonyms; the same occurred in relation to Dewey and education. Consequently it is also reasonable to say the same in relation to pragmatism and education. Therefore, in order to provide a significant description of pragmatism in Brazil in the previous century, it is indispensable to analyze the presence of the American philosopher in education.

In this essay, we show that...

A surprising fact in the historiography of twentieth-century Hispanic philosophy is its almost total opacity toward the American tradition. This deep rift between the two traditions is even more striking when one realizes the almost total neglect in the Hispanic world of such an outstanding Hispanic-American thinker as George Santayana, or the real affinity between the central questions of American pragmatism and the topics and problems addressed by the most relevant Hispanic thinkers of the last century: Miguel de Unamuno, José Ortega y Gasset, Eugenio d’Ors, Carlos Vaz Ferreira, José Ferrater Mora, and so on.

Within this wide framework, this...

The lament by academic practitioners of Latin America’s philosophical traditions that John Dewey has been left out of the discussions of philosophy in the Spanish-speaking world may leave philosophers surprised to learn that their colleagues across the quad, the historians, have assigned Dewey an important role in the development of postrevolutionary Mexican social theory since at least the 1950s. One participant in this trend was historian Ramón E. Ruíz, who argued in 1961 that Dewey’s Mexican students Moisés Sáenz and Rafael Ramírez had adopted Deweyan ethics as part of a grand experiment to construct a rural school system capable of...

The impact of Ralph Waldo Emerson on Latin American philosopher José Ingenieros needs to be explored for two main reasons. The first is that to better understand and appreciate José Ingenieros and his moral philosophy, we need to understand his deep admiration for Emerson. Second, this relationship has never been explored in the history of philosophy. For over a hundred years, this unique connection has been hiding a link between Latin American philosophy and American pragmatism. Exploring this link is a promising area of research because the similarities between Emerson and Ingenieros are no mere coincidence. There is great evidence...

Eugenio d’Ors was born in Barcelona in 1881 and died in Villanueva y la Geltrú (Barcelona) in 1954.¹ He took his first steps as a writer within the culture that predominated in the Barcelona of the end of the nineteenth century; we can therefore say that his early work belongs to the Catalan modernist movement. However, while working as a columnist, mainly on art criticism at the newspaperEl Poble Catalàduring the second half of 1904 and the first half of 1905, a progressive change in his understanding of how Catalonia must be modernized becomes apparent. The reasons behind...

At the end of the nineteenth century, just after the end of the Pacific War that confronted Peruvians and Chileans, a generation of philosophers emerged in Peru that became interested in positivism. They were not greatly influenced by the first generation of European positivists such as Comte, but mainly by the second generation, especially by Herbert Spencer’s evolutionism. This was the first time that Peru produced a group of philosophers that shared an authentic interest in developing original views on contemporary philosophical issues, even applying them to Peru’s sociological and historical characteristics. It is true that in colonial times there...

The Uruguayan philosopher and educator Carlos Vaz Ferreira (1872–1958 ) was one of the first Hispanic readers of pragmatism. He introduced William James’s ideas to his country and critically revised them. In 1909 Vaz Ferreira publishedEl pragmatismo, the first Spanish-language book devoted to pragmatism.¹ This collection of lectures, given in 1908, was translated into French in 1914, thus giving Vaz’s ideas an international presence. Famously, Albert Einstein had the opportunity to read this translation, and in a letter to Vaz Ferreira he demonstrated a basic agreement with certain points.² As stated in the first pages of the book,...

Bergson maintained that at the heart of every great philosophy there pulses a simple and unique intuition of the way things are, a single point which its author attempts, ultimately unsuccessfully, to articulate and communicate to others.

In this point is something simple, infinitely simple, so extraordinarily simple that the philosopher has never succeeded in saying it. And that is why he went on talking all his life . . . what he has accomplished, by a complication which provoked more complication, by developments heaped upon developments, has been to convey with an increasing approximation the simplicity of his original...

Risieri Frondizi (1910–1983 )¹ was arguably the Latin American philosopher with the strongest personal ties to philosophy in North America. Although Frondizi studied with Francisco Romero in Argentina, his relation with North American philosophers was also key to his philosophical development. He won a scholarship to do advanced studies at Columbia University in New York, making him the first Argentine to study philosophy in the United States. Although his scholarship was for Columbia, he wanted to study at Harvard and this wish was granted. He entered Harvard and studied with pragmatist philosophers, such as C. I. Lewis, R. B....

Let me begin with an anecdote. Last fall I was teaching a class in American philosophy. After class a student from Colombia said to me, “La filosofia de James y Dewey me encanta, pero no puedo concebir que estos filosofos sean Americanos” (“Professor, I love James’s and Dewey’s philosophy but I can’t think of them asAmericanphilosophers”). Why, for someone acquainted with both American and Latin culture, is the philosophy of Dewey and James experienced as being (on the whole) more Latin than American? What could this mean? And does this experience not call into question the standard effort...

InThe Making of the Mexican Mind, Patrick Romanell writes,

The secret imaginative background of American philosophy is, on the one hand, the tragic sense of life rooted in Latin American existentialism and, on the other, the epic sense of life rooted in Anglo-American pragmatism. However distinct these two philosophies of the good life may be . . . they complement each other and share a common faith, namely,a humanistic attitude towards life, together with an heroic conception of man.¹

Romanell is optimistic that the virtues of Latin American existentialism and Anglo-American pragmatism are enough for an adequate reconstruction...

Now that cultural differences have come under suspicion with ethnic profiling, now that a postracial and postethnic American identity is often invoked, now that the process of globalization is countered with the affirmation of national identities and indigenous races and ethnicities, now more than ever, a pragmatic reconstruction of the place of ethnic diversity and multiculturalism in our lives is needed. Drawing on American and Latin American philosophers such as John Dewey, Alain Locke, and José Martí, my essay will articulate athoroughgoing pluralisticview of ethnic identity in general and of Hispanic identity in particular. I will argue that...

In his recent study of the interconnections between globalization and violence,Fear of Small Numbers, Arjun Appadurai draws a distinction between the civic and the political patriotism expressed by many immigrants living within the United States. Especially for those immigrants coming from the Global South, there is a sense of “surviving in a moral cocoon within the belly of the beast” when it comes to describing life in America.¹ These immigrants, both legal and undocumented, treasure the idea of taking advantage of the freedoms and liberties that come with citizenship. Nonetheless, they feel contempt for the “American way of life”...

The process of immigration is one of the most transformative phenomena in the Americas today. In its personal, social, political, and cultural dimensions, it affects the lives of individuals, communities, societies, and nations throughout the American continent.¹ In this essay I attempt to give a philosophical account of the personal experience of immigration. I propose to examine the experience of South–North immigration in the Americas, with careful consideration of the reflections that some Anglo-and Latin American thinkers make possible for us regarding this issue. Charles S. Peirce’s philosophical account of the evolution of personality undergirds the conceptual structure of...

If John Dewey were alive today, he would be interested in and supportive of one of the most radical and insightful groups of feminist thinkers at the end of the twentieth century: Latina Lesbian Women in the U.S.A. (LLWU). Latina lesbians are only one of many marginalized groups in U.S. society whose existence is problematic from a certain predominant metaphysical perspective. According to this perspective, to have a multiple identity or to be in between cultures, genders, or races is to be ambiguous, impure, and therefore inauthentic or anomalous. This perspective is more than an academic abstraction. It is deeply...

This chapter is a first step toward developing a theoretical framework for a culturally sensitive, experience-based pedagogy for the United States. Toward this aim, a comparison of José Martí and John Dewey is both useful and important. Dewey’s works on education are primary reading in education programs around the country, and innovators in alternative experience-based teaching are applying Dewey’s ideas today. José Martí shares many similarities with Dewey. Although Martí was Cuban, he spent a large portion of his life exiled in the United States. During this period he wrote extensively on social issues in the United States; U.S. education...

A critique of contemporary pedagogy in American schools as it relates to minority and immigrant students has been termed “subtractive schooling” by Angela Valenzuela. As the name indicates, subtractive schooling is a type of pedagogy that takes away or subtracts aspects of a student’s experience. I believe that this is a problem that should concern us, and I use John Dewey’s and Paulo Freire’s theories on pedagogy to argue why this is the case.

This essay is informed by sociological research as well as Dewey’s and Freire’s theories on pedagogy. Freire’s incisive social criticism coupled with Dewey’s pragmatic sensibility can...

Eduardo Mendieta has made an important gesture toward what we might call “Continental American philosophy” by announcing his hope that a future generation of scholars will begin to “develop, mature, and conceive a greater America that includes all of its subcontinents,” so that “we will begin to think of Latin American and North American philosophies as chapters in a larger geopolitical and world-historical school of American philosophy from this hemisphere.”¹ Under this banner, which I believe unites many of the reflections that constitute this volume, my essay examines the ethical and political significance of religion in classical American pragmatism and...