The Bet of Existential Phenomenology and the Emergence of Critical Philosophy in Latin America: Towards a Phenomenology of Decolonization

Abstract

From the first decades of the twentieth century, in Latin America, the channels opened by the reception of phenomenology, particularly in Mexico and Argentina, gravitated significantly into the understanding of culture and the value of thinking as Latin American.With the opening up of the most diverse fields of contemporary knowledge, the novelty of what is happening in the field of the humanities was that it served as a basis for combating not only certain biases of positivist scientism but, in broader terms, for looking at oneself and beginning to examine the blunders of both the conservative and liberal traditions and, in this way, forging new paths in the field of philosophical knowledge and the knowledge of that which is owned. Thus, within the framework of this reception that promoted the generation of «the forgers», a phenomenological-existential aspect takes shape. In the emergence of this critical expression, two phenomena converge in a decisive way: the dramatic political-social circumstances and the contrariness generated at the same time by the tension between two different cultural horizons: the modern and the ancestral. Hence, from the consideration of oneself and one's own existential condition, disturbing glimpses emerge about what one is as a subject and, therefore, about inherited notions.