This book is the third of the series which the Department of Cultural Affairs of the Pan American Union is publishing on the philosophy of individual Latin American countries. The first two books published were: La filosofía en el Perú, by Augusto Salazar Bondy, and Panorama de la filosofía cubana, by Humberto Piñera Llera. These works were preceded by Contemporary Latin American Philosophy, an excellent anthology compiled by Aníbal Sánchez Reulet. The publication of these studies undoubtedly shows the importance which philosophy is acquiring along with other established Latin American disciplines such as literature, history, art, anthropology, etc.
In La filosofía en la Argentina the author describes the evolution of philosophical ideas and how they have affected the cultural growth of that country.
The book is divided into five periods: Scholasticism, French ideologies, Romanticism, Positivism, and Contemporary ideas. During the first two periods the teaching of philosophy was limited only to readings of assigned works. In the Romantic period, philosophy was discussed and commented upon. Only during the contemporary period, that is to say, in the last thirty years, has the philosopher, for the first time, become a specialist exclusively dedicated to the study of philosophy.
The man most responsible for this change was Alejandro Korn, and to a lesser degree Aberidi and Rougues, all of whom are considered the founders of Argentinian philosophy.
Today Francisco Romero is accepted as the most important thinker not only of that country but also of Latin America. Besides Romero there are other individuals whose philosophical interest identify them as Thomists, Existentialists, Humanists, and there are also those whose works or ideas do not fit any of the previous classifications.
In our day, concludes the author, himself a philosopher, because of the diversity of philosophical thought we do not find in Argentina a definite orientation and, therefore, we cannot predict what will be the Argentinian philosophy of the future.
The publication of La filosofía en la Argentina is certainly justified: it is a well-organized and well-written book; it has a bibliography; and most important, it adds a necessary work to the total study, in Spanish, of Latin American philosophy. For reasons which are obvious this reviewer feels that a book of this type should be translated into English.
