Barbarism and civilization in the latin american philosophical thought

Abstract

The history of philosophical ideas in Latin America underwent a significant shift from the development of positivist ideas, which played an important role in the Latin American philosophical evolution. Argentina was one of Latin America’s longest established sui generis positivism in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. One of its illustrious sons, Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, is the one to have formulated the civilized and barbaric literary figures. It succeeds once exiled in Chile, writing a series of articles published in 1845 in the newspaper El Progreso. In this essay it is analyzed the vision of the Argentine thinker in the light of the historical demands in Latin America, for whom the best way to fight against barbarism is to be European, but being the Franco-Anglo-Saxon Europe not the Iberian, because from the first we can rebuild America for being synonymous with superiority, while with the second we will be inferiority.