Academic Rebels in Chile: The Role of Philosophy in Higher Education and Politics

This book is very welcome. Given the recent (and, in most ways, praiseworthy) emphasis on economic and social themes in Chilean historical writing, the history of ideas has fallen into comparative neglect. Iván Jaksić’s competent and admirably readable study is emphatically an exercise in intellectual history, though it is less concerned with ideas themselves than with the development of an intellectual discipline, philosophy, and the relationship of its main practitioners to the course of Chilean life since independence. None of the philosophers Jaksić discusses has made much of an impact beyond the frontiers of Chile—unlike Chilean poets or, more recently, Chilean novelists and popular musicians—but several of them were extremely influential within the nation as educators and public figures: Valentín Letelier, Enrique Molina, and Jorge Millas, to name but three. Jaksić bases his account on a distinction (by no means exclusively applicable to Chile) between what he terms “professionalist” and “critical” philosophers. The former are chiefly concerned with philosophy pure and simple, the latter wish to relate their thinking to the broader problems of society, which for them has sometimes implied a political stance—not necessarily one of uncritical allegiance to a particular political party, however, philosophers being what they are. Inevitably, many of the critical philosophers fell foul of the Pinochet dictatorship after 1973: Jaksić ’s final chapter (6) gives a sad impression of disruption and dispersal. Some readers, perhaps, might be tempted to ask what tangible benefits academic philosophy has ever conferred on Chile. I would not be one of them. A country without philosophers could have few, if any, pretensions to civilization. Jaksić has done us all a service in casting light on this neglected but important dimension of Chilean history.