Abstract

In the summer of 1995, Santiago Castro-Gómez wrote a convincing text entitled Critique of Latin American Reason, and continued Roberto Salazar-Ramos’ work‒who also took part in The Group of Bogotá, responsible for institutionalizing the project of Latin American Philosophy in Colombia‒in order to show how the creation of “The Latin American” was possible through the operation of a series of discourses. Rather than an a priori, the category of “The Latin American” is defined by Castro-Gómez as the effect of a series of discourses to which a specific cultural identity was provided. Consequently, the author uses the tradition of historicism to rethink the history of ideas, so that, instead of studying the reception of European ideas and measuring how close to that scaffolding was Latin American thought, its study should begin from the philosophical and scientific practices themselves as a “part of the critical exercise in Colombia”. It is precisely within this horizon opened by Castro-Gómez’s writings in which this essay is inserted.