## 1. Geographical and Theoretical Boundaries



This entry gives an overview of analytic philosophy *produced*
in Latin America, not *about* Latin America. It covers
philosophical developments concerning diverse and universal problems
that are at the heart of Western philosophy. It focuses on
philosophers who have developed a large part of their research and
teaching practice in Latin American
 countries.[1]



What is the scope of analytic philosophy? Analytic philosophy is not
restricted to the use of conceptual analysis (Ezcurdia 2015).
Following Rabossi (1975) and Sierra (1987), one could draw the
boundaries of analytic philosophy by focusing on some family traits: a
positive attitude toward scientific knowledge, a cautious attitude
toward metaphysics, a conception of philosophy as a conceptual task, a
close relationship between language and philosophy, a concern with
offering arguments to answer philosophical questions, and a search for
conceptual clarity.



It might be objected that non-analytic philosophy can also exhibit
these same traits. One can circumvent this problem by adding two
additional traits: a historical dimension (Glock 2008) and a
sociological dimension (Gracia 2010). Historically, analytic
philosophy has its roots in the works of authors such as Frege, Moore,
Russell, Wittgenstein, and the logical positivists, and it has been
pursued by subsequent authors like Anscombe, Ayer, Austin, Ryle,
Sellars, Strawson, Quine, Davidson, Barcan Marcus, and Kripke (the
"analytic canon"). Sociologically, the analytic tradition
is made up of several generations of people who enter advisor-student
and colleague-colleague relationships. They participate in shared
activities in which they recognize each other as members of the same
community, discuss and research similar topics using similar
approaches, and share a theoretical
 background.[2]



Analytic philosophy as practiced in Latin America has two additional
traits. First, since analytic philosophy was introduced in Latin
America while other philosophical traditions were dominant, Latin
American analytic philosophy often deals with metaphilosophical issues
such as the nature of philosophy, its role in society, its relation to
other philosophical traditions, and the best ways of teaching it.
Second, given that analytic philosophy in Latin America has often
served the purposes of promoting change in conservative intellectual
institutions and social and political structures, several analytic
philosophers in Latin America have engaged politically in their home
countries.


## 2. Development of Analytic Philosophy in Latin America



This section describes the emergence and consolidation of communities
of analytic philosophers in various Latin American countries. For the
current purposes, an academic community is a group of people whose
members investigate common topics by following similar approaches and
engaging in dialogue with one another (Hurtado
 2007).[3]
 In Argentina, Mexico, and Brazil, there have been consolidated
analytic communities since the early 1990s. Colombia started late and
at a slow pace. However, it has seen a fast development over the last
few years and currently has a community that displays several features
of a consolidated community. Chile and Peru have taken important
measures to foster work in the analytic tradition that might lead to
the creation of strong analytic communities. In other countries, there
are either scattered efforts to promote analytic philosophy (Costa
Rica, Puerto Rico, Uruguay, Venezuela) or no clear signs of its
presence.


### 2.1 Argentina (1940-1990)



*Analytic philosophy appeared in Argentina in the mid-forties in
small discussion groups outside the universities. In the mid-fifties,
it entered the universities and academic institutions in two different
areas almost simultaneously. On the one hand, mathematicians and
physicists interested in the foundations of mathematics and the
natural sciences introduced the logical developments of the early
twentieth century and the ideas of the logical positivists of the
Vienna Circle. On the other hand, lawyers and experts in the
foundations of law introduced formal developments and analytic tools
from ordinary language philosophy in their studies of legal language.
Those groups were connected from the beginning. During the 1960s and
1970s, the country faced a serious political crisis that compelled
many philosophers to either leave the country or develop their
activities within a new private institution (SADAF). With the recovery
of democracy in the 1980s, analytic philosophy returned to the
universities and other public institutions. It was in the 1980s that
the first Argentinian journal devoted to analytic philosophy appeared.
From the 1980s onwards, the overall quality and originality of
philosophical output increased, and analytic philosophy was settled
across the country.*



The early reception of analytic philosophy took place from the
mid-1940s to the mid-1950s. In 1944, Mario Bunge founded
*Minerva*, probably the first philosophy journal exclusively
devoted to philosophy in Latin America (Marti 1998;
Salmeron 1991a). In subsequent years, analytic philosophy was
also studied in various reading groups that gathered both supporters
and critics of analytic philosophy. From 1945 onwards, the members of
the *Grupo Argentino de la Academia Internacional de Historia y
Filosofia de la Ciencia* discussed Russell and Carnap
(Rabossi 1984). In 1952, two new groups emerged: a group hosted by the
*Instituto Libre de Estudios Superiores* interested in logic
and philosophy of science and the *Circulo Filosofico
de Buenos Aires* led by Bunge. The creation of these two new
groups indicates the presence of a growing community of people
interested in philosophical analysis. It was in the
*Circulo* that they discussed a manuscript of
Bunge's *Causality: The Place of the Causal Principle in
Modern Science*--one of the first and most significant
analytic works published by a Latin American philosopher.



A few years later, analytic philosophy formally entered various
universities and other public institutions. In 1954, Carlos Cossio
organized a seminar on von Wright's *An Essay in Modal
Logic* in the Faculty of Law and Social Sciences at the
Universidad de Buenos Aires. Familiarity with Tarski's
*Introduction to Logic and the Methodology of Deductive
Sciences* was a requirement for attending that seminar (Rabossi
1984). In 1956, Bunge took up the chair in philosophy of science in
the Philosophy Department at the Universidad de Buenos Aires. In 1957,
Gregorio Klimovsky took up the chair in logic.



During his almost ten years at the Universidad de Buenos Aires, Bunge
exerted firm opposition to the metaphysical trends emanating from
European philosophy and created *Cuadernos de
Epistemologia*, a collection of translations of important
articles for students (Rabossi 1984). He also published
*Antologia semantica*, a comprehensive collection
of translations into Spanish of seminal texts from the analytic canon.
In 1965, Bunge decided to pursue his career abroad. Nevertheless, his
more than twenty years of intellectual activity in Argentina were key
to the development of analytic philosophy in the country (for further
information about Bunge's role in Latin American philosophy of
science, see the entry
 Philosophy of Science in Latin America).



Klimovsky introduced axiomatic set theory and the debates concerning
the foundations of mathematics. Though Klimovsky published few papers,
his deep knowledge and enthusiasm for logic, the foundations of
mathematics, the methodology of natural sciences, the foundations of
psychoanalysis, and the history of science left a deep impression on
his
 students.[4]
 Some of them became the first generation of Argentinian analytic
philosophers. Two of them were crucial for the development of analytic
philosophy in the country: Thomas Moro Simpson and Felix
Schuster.



Simpson introduced philosophy of language as a discipline in
Argentina. He published *Formas logicas, realidad y
significado* (1964), a very influential book in Latin America.
Indeed, Simpson taught that material at the *Instituto de
Investigaciones Filosoficas* (IIFs) in Mexico in 1967 and
the book was translated into Portuguese in
 1976.[5]
 In 1973, he published *Semantica filosofica*
(1973), an anthology of translations of seminal works from the
analytic canon. Simpson's students Raul Orayen and
Alberto Moretti worked on logic, philosophy of logic, and philosophy
of language. Orayen focused on the philosophy of logic and language,
addressing problems raised by Russell, Frege, Quine, and Kripke. He is
best known for his formulation of "Orayen's
paradox", a paradox that arises when one tries to formulate a
model that captures the intended interpretation of the language for
set
 theory.[6]
 He worked in Argentina until the late 1970s and joined IIFs in 1982.
Once in Mexico, Orayen trained several analytic philosophers and wrote
his most significant contributions. The works from that period were
collected in *Logica, significado y ontologia*
 (1989).[7]
 Moretti specialized in Frege and studied Davidson's philosophy
of language and Tarski's theory of truth. He developed a view of
logic as a condition of possibility of language, reality, and thought.
Some of his most significant contributions are collected in
*Interpretar y referir. Ejercicios de analisis
filosofico* (2008) and *En sayos analiticos*
(2021).



Schuster made significant contributions to social philosophy. His book
*Explicacion y prediccion: La validez del
conocimiento en ciencias sociales* (1982) is considered a classic
and has been reprinted numerous times. It examines the structure,
methodology, and predictive power of theories in the social
 sciences.[8]
[9]



As indicated above, Cossio from the Faculty of Law at the Universidad
de Buenos Aires had organized a seminar on modal logic in 1954. In the
following years, he and his successor, Ambrosio Gioja continued those
 developments.[10]
 Some of their students became the founders of the analytic tradition
in the
 country.[11]
 Particularly relevant are Genaro
 Carrio[12]
 and Eduardo Rabossi, who were interested in the analysis of ordinary
language. Rabossi had wide-ranging interests. In *Analisis
filosofico, lenguaje y metafisica* (1975), he
introduced basic ideas from the analytic tradition into the
Spanish-speaking world. In ethics, his most influential book is *La
justificacion moral del castigo* (1976). One of his most
important works, *En el comienzo Dios creo el canon*,
was published posthumously (2008) (See
 Section 3.3).[13]



Among the first analytic philosophers trained in law school, there was
an alternative approach that applied formal tools to elucidate the
language of law. Especially noteworthy is Carlos Alchourron and
Eugenio Bulygin's *Normative Systems* (1971), a
pioneering book on deontic logic. The authors presented legal systems
as deductive systems and studied the logical asymmetries between the
processes of promulgation and abolition of
 laws.[14]
 Alchourron's aim was to develop a formal system that
avoided the introduction of inconsistencies in legal bodies. The
analogy with belief systems led him to focus on belief change,
producing the first formal paper on the dynamics of belief
(Alchourron et al. 1985). The theory, known as AGM (by the
initials of the last names of its creators: Carlos Alchourron,
Peter Gardenfors, and David Makinson), has had a major impact
worldwide (for a presentation of Alchourron and
collaborators' work, see Arlo-Costa and Ferme
(2009) and the entry
 Logic of Belief Revision).[15]



One of the youngest members of this generation, Carlos Nino, played an
influential role in both philosophy and the institutional history of
Argentina. He made contributions to ethics, philosophy of law, and
constitutional
 theory.[16]
 Nino is also remembered for his political commitment to the recovery
of democracy in Argentina in the 1980s
 (Section 3.2
 introduces Nino's work).



From the late 1960s to the 1970s, Argentina was hit by a political
crisis. In 1966, a *coup d'etat* that led to a
military intervention in the universities compelled many philosophers
to resign their positions. Some emigrated to other countries, others
left the country for a couple of years, and still others tried to find
an alternative way of doing philosophy. Thus, shortly after, various
philosophers started to gather outside official circles in order to
continue their philosophical work. In 1972, they created SADAF
(*Sociedad Argentina de Analisis Filosofico*), an
association analogous to the *Aristotelian Society* that
initially organized talks and seminars (Rabossi
 1984).[17]
 In hindsight, SADAF made it possible to establish a unified community
of analytic philosophers. In addition to maintaining the spirit and
practice of analytic philosophy during the years in which it was
excluded from the public sphere (1966-1983), SADAF and its
members carried out three major tasks: 1) they trained young
generations within the analytic tradition; 2) they strengthened their
connections with analytic communities from other countries, mostly
IIFs in Mexico and the *Centro de logica,
epistemologia e historia da ciencia* in
Brazil; and 3) they created, in 1981, *Analisis
Filosofico*, the first journal exclusively devoted to
analytic philosophy in Argentina and the second one in Latin
 America.[18]



Although analytic philosophy has developed for the most part in Buenos
Aires, there has been work in analytic philosophy in other cities
since the 1960s.



In Cordoba, Andres Raggio was appointed chair of logic
(1956) and then of philosophy of science at the Universidad Nacional
de Cordoba. Ernesto Garzon Valdes was hired the
same year as a researcher at the *Instituto de Filosofia del
Derecho* at the same university. The political crisis compelled
them to leave the country in the 1970s. In the late 1980s, Alberto
Moreno and Rabossi helped develop analytic philosophy of language and
mind. Their student Carolina Scotto is nowadays the most established
researcher in those two
 areas.[19]
 She has also managed to build a solid research group that has made
contributions to those areas. From the early 1980s to the 1990s,
Horacio Faas focused on logic. During that same period, Victor
Rodriguez worked in philosophy of science. For more than twenty
years, Rodriguez has organized the *Jornadas de
Epistemologia e Historia de la Ciencia*, an annual meeting
open to analytic philosophy.



In the 1960s, Roberto Rojo introduced the works of Carnap,
Wittgenstein, and Quine at the Universidad Nacional de Tucuman
(Rabossi 1984).



In the early 1970s, research in logic developed at the Universidad
Nacional de La Plata with Carlos Lungarzo and Gladys Palau.
Unfortunately, both were compelled to resign in 1975. Nevertheless,
analytic philosophy returned to the university after the recovery of
democracy in 1983.



Despite the political and economic crisis, analytic philosophy started
to thrive in Argentina in the 1970s and it was firmly established by
the late 1980s. After the recovery of democracy in 1983, most of
SADAF's founders returned to the Universidad de Buenos Aires,
where they found younger generations of students eager to be trained
in the analytic tradition. This first generation of analytic
philosophers mentored most analytic philosophers currently working in
Argentina and many Argentinian philosophers who have pursued their
careers abroad. Their influence also spread to other parts of the
country through the national university
 system.[20]


### 2.2 Mexico (1940-1990)



*Mexican analytic philosophy originated with a group of
philosophers trained in phenomenology, existentialism, the history of
philosophy, and influenced by Marxism. Their teachers were Spanish
philosophers who emigrated to Mexico in the late 1930s and the first
professional Mexican philosophers at
 UNAM.[21]
 Hence, the development of Mexican analytic philosophy is closely tied
to UNAM and, as will become clear, the Instituto de Investigaciones
Filosoficas (IIFs). Although analytic philosophy started to
spread to other Mexican institutions in the 1970s, IIFs remains the
main analytic center in the country. The first Mexican analytic
philosophers saw philosophical analysis as a critical tool to move
away from the European conceptions of philosophy they were familiar
with and as a methodological device to realize the phenomenological
ideal of philosophy as a rigorous science.*



In *Positivismo, neopositivismo y fenomenologia* (1941),
Antonio Caso compared logical positivism with nineteenth-century
positivism and phenomenology. Building on phenomenology and idealism,
he underlined the explanatory limits of the scientific method (Dussel
et al. 2009). In the mid-1950s, his student Nicolas Molina
defended logical positivism and started a project to translate some of
the main works from that movement.[22]



Jose Gaos was the most influential philosopher in Mexico from
1940 to 1960. He embraced a radical form of historicism: philosophy
consisted in a series of personal systems of the world that were
inextricably tied to the individual's own circumstances (Valero
2012; Zirion 2021). Alejandro Rossi, one of his students,
thought of Gaos' view as an extreme form of relativism that led
to skepticism about philosophy (Rossi 1970).



In 1959, Gaos and his students organized an event commemorating the
fifty years of the publication of Husserl's book *Philosophy
as Rigorous Science*. Alejandro Rossi saw in Husserl's work
a confrontation between Gaos' historicist view of philosophy and
a view of philosophy as a rigorous science. Rossi also saw in the
analytic philosophy he had started to explore a way of turning
philosophy into a rigorous science (Rossi 1996). After the Husserl
event, Rossi went to Oxford in 1961, and got first-hand knowledge of
the latest developments in Oxonian philosophy.



When Rossi returned to UNAM, he taught philosophy of language. These
teaching activities enabled him to prepare a series of articles in
that area. Rossi examined definite descriptions like "The actual
king of France", defending the Strawsonian view according to
which those who use definite descriptions *do not say* that
there is a unique king of France but presuppose it (Ezcurdia 2015). In
his article "Nombres propios", Rossi anticipated some of
the problems of descriptivism underlined by Kripke (1980) and others
(Fernandez and Valdes 2009). These and other articles
were later reprinted in *Lenguaje y significado*
 (1969).[23]
[24]



The creation and development of IIFs played an important role in the
introduction and consolidation of analytic philosophy in Mexico.
Eduardo Garcia Maynez--a philosopher of law trained
in phenomenology--was appointed as the dean of the Facultad de
Filosofia y Letras (FFyL) at UNAM in 1940. Shortly after, he
created the *Centro de Estudios Filosoficos*. In 1945,
the *Centro* became independent from FFyL and the governing
board of UNAM appointed Garcia Maynez as its first
chair. Garcia Maynez held that position for twenty
years. The *Centro* initially lacked an analytic orientation.
However, its autonomy from FFyL prepared the conditions for the
development of analytic philosophy in the 1970s. In the preceding
years, Garcia Maynez worked on the creation of a
specialized library in philosophy, the first full-time research jobs
in philosophy, and an editorial
 program.[25]
[26]



Fernando Salmeron followed Garcia Maynez as a
chair of the *Centro* in early 1966. He stayed in office until
the end of 1977. Working in close collaboration with Rossi, he
promoted an analytic turn at the *Centro*, which acquired its
current name (*"Instituto de Investigaciones
Filosoficas"*) in
 1967.[27]
 Salmeron described the *Centro* in 1966 as a place that
was not conducive to intellectual collaboration. Its researchers did
not share any common topics, they differed dramatically in their
training, and they employed different methods (Salmeron 1978).
For Salmeron (1991a), philosophy is a collective endeavor that
requires a shared tradition, a common vocabulary, and the employment
of the same methods. Hence, Salmeron set himself the goal of
transforming the nascent IIFs into a space suitable for intellectual
collaboration. To that end, his administration pursued four
strategies. First, it trained undergraduate students in logic,
philosophy of science, and philosophy of language, and prepared them
to pursue postgraduate studies at analytic centers abroad (mostly in
Britain and the United States). Second, IIFs attracted renowned,
experienced researchers whose work was close to the analytic
tradition. In this way, local philosophers like Wonfilio Trejo and
Luis Villoro joined IIFs in 1974. Shortly after, three foreign
philosophers of science joined as well: Mario Otero, Mario Bunge, and
Ulises Moulines. Although most of them stayed at IIFs for short
periods of time, they left an important
 legacy.[28]
 Third, IIFs developed an ambitious program of visiting professors
with the aim of keeping the local community up to date with
contemporary debates. These visits were combined with the organization
of events with prominent analytic philosophers as keynote speakers.
Fourth, IIFs developed an ambitious editorial program to translate key
analytic works into Spanish. Salmeron's work as chair of
IIFs consumed most of his middle age. Thus, his philosophical
contributions were heavily influenced by those endeavors. Some of his
best works are *La filosofia y las actitudes morales*
(1971) and *Ensenanza y filosofia*
 (1991b).[29]



Around 1964, Rossi had the idea of creating a philosophy journal
exclusively devoted to analytic philosophy. Salmeron and
Villoro joined him in that project. They dubbed it
*Critica* and conceived it as the first vehicle for
discussion amongst analytically oriented philosophers from all Latin
America and other continents. The first issue appeared in January
1967. Its editors did not see analytic philosophy as a specific
philosophical school. They rather saw it as a critical tool to oppose
prevalent philosophical trends and as an efficient method to develop
original philosophical work in Latin America. On their view,
philosophical analysis could elevate philosophy to a higher level of
professionalism because it would allow its practitioners to make clear
and precise claims and arguments (Salmeron 1991a).



With the end of Salmeron's period in 1977 came the turn
for the analytic philosophers trained abroad to take the reins of
IIFs. Hugo Margain came first. Unfortunately, he passed five
months after his appointment as chair. Widely perceived as one of the
brightest philosophers of his generation, he published several
articles from 1969 to 1977, collected in a posthumous book entitled
*Racionalidad, lenguaje y filosofia* (1978). In that
book, Margain defended a naturalist approach to rationality
(Salmeron 1991a).



Enrique Villanueva followed Margain and stayed in office from
1978 to 1984. During that period, some iconic IIFs activities took
off: the *International Symposia of Philosophy* and the
*Catedra Jose Gaos*, a named lecture series
analogous to the *John Locke Lectures* at Oxford
(Benitez 2010). Villanueva also continued
Salmeron's training program and hired many of IIFs
best-known researchers, such as Raul Orayen and Mark
 Platts.[30]



Between the 1970s and the 1980s, there was a quantitative and
qualitative growth in the production of analytic philosophy in Mexico
(Benitez 2010). The growth in academic output can be credited
to two generations: philosophers who had been trained in phenomenology
but became interested in analytic philosophy and the new generation of
analytic philosophers who had received training abroad. The list of
names is large, so just two examples will be
 considered.[31]



Luis Villoro was trained in phenomenology but was interested in
analytic philosophy from the 1960s until the mid-1980s, studying
analytic authors like Ayer, Carnap, and Russell. However, he never
thought of analytic philosophy as an end in itself (Valdes and
Fernandez 2009). He rather saw it as a means to reflect on
topics that were already present in his pre-analytic period but were
not part of the philosophical conversation in the analytic writings of
his time: the nature of ideology, the relations between knowledge and
social life, and the possibility of transforming social praxis.



*Creer, saber, conocer* (1982) is the most analytic of
Villoro's works. It offers a dispositional analysis of belief,
proposes a relativist solution to the Gettier problem, and defends a
pluralist view of knowledge with constitutive relations to practical
rationality. Although Villoro agreed with Rossi and Salmeron
that philosophical analysis was a good way of professionalizing
philosophy, he did not think of science as the only (or most
important) form of knowledge. In addition to
*"saber"*, exemplified by scientific knowledge, he
valued *"sabiduria"* (a *sui generis*
kind of wisdom that involves a form of truth defined in terms
authenticity rather than correspondence) and
*"conocer"* (a form of acquaintance that relies on
personal experience and interpersonal relations). Villoro's work
was one of the first attempts at developing a technical vocabulary in
Spanish for analytic
 epistemology.[32]



Mark Platts is an example of a philosopher trained abroad. He
completed *Ways of Meaning* (1979) during his 1978 visit to
IIFs. In that book, he explained Davidson's program of an
interpretation theory of truth capable of offering a theory of meaning
for a language and offered accounts of proper names, adjectives, and
natural kind terms. In 1984, Platts was appointed as a researcher at
IIFs. In close collaboration with Rossi's students and Orayen,
Platts helped develop the area of philosophy of language. His works
from the 1980s and 1990s focused on desire (Platts 1985, 1986, 1994).
He also initiated a public debate on the ethical issues raised by the
AIDS epidemic.



With the appointment of Leon Olive as chair in 1985,
IIFs entered an "expansion phase" (Benitez 2010).
Olive worked towards making an impact on the cultural life of
the country and designed a graduate program in philosophy of
 science.[33]
 He also promoted the expansion of research areas (Benitez
2010) and made new appointments to support research in those areas.
Many of those hires did not self-identify as analytic. Hence, at the
end of Olive's period in the early 1990s, IIFs had
changed considerably.



It is not easy to square the works of all the philosophers who joined
IIFs during Olive's term as pieces of analytic
philosophy. However, Carlos Pereda's work has analytic
overtones. Pereda has investigated the aims, motivations, types, and
mechanisms of argumentation. He has pleaded for a broad concept of
argumentation that goes beyond formal deduction and has used it to
develop a novel concept of reason. He has opposed an austere view of
reason as restricted to thoughts regimented by a formal calculus and
advocated for a reflective reason that admits figurative language and
probability, considers the history of concepts, and *who* says
something and *to whom* they say
 it.[34]



In the 1990s, IIFs researchers had already made novel contributions to
a variety of topics, they had edited a prestigious journal devoted to
analytic philosophy, and IIFs attracted international students and
 researchers.[35]


### 2.3 Brazil (1930-1990)



*Brazilian analytic philosophy is the outgrowth of several
crisscrossing threads spanning a large territory. A logic thread led
to the development of a Brazilian school of logic centered around the
study of paraconsistent formal systems. Work in mathematical logic
started in the late 1920s and bloomed in the late 1970s.
Independently, starting in the 1940s, a philosophy thread introduced
themes from the analytic tradition into philosophy departments. This
thread was led by scholars trained in continental philosophy and the
history of philosophy who became interested in logical positivism,
logic, Wittgenstein, ordinary language philosophy, and the history and
philosophy of science. Although many of its members were not fully
committed to the analytic tradition, their writings engaged with
analytic authors. The logic and philosophy threads started to
intersect in the mid-1970s when philosophers increased their
interaction with mathematicians. Throughout the late 1970s and 1980s,
analytic philosophy expanded to many Brazilian states, leading to a
fragmentation of philosophical activity in Brazil. In the 1980s, there
were several initiatives to promote inter-state collaboration. The
integration started to bear fruit in the 1990s, so one can speak of a
Brazilian analytic community by the end of the 1990s.*



In the first half of the twentieth century, scholastic philosophy was
cultivated in Brazil, so most work in logic focused on Aristotelian
syllogism and fallacies. However, there had been several attempts at
introducing mathematical logic in Brazil since the 1930s. Manuel
Amoroso Costa's *As Ideias Fundamentais da
Matematica* (1929) included a chapter devoted to
mathematical logic. In 1940, Vicente Ferreira da Silva published
*Elementos de Logica Matematica*, the first book
exclusively devoted to mathematical logic in Latin America. In 1942,
Quine was invited to teach a one-semester course at the Universidade
de Sao Paulo (USP). His lectures gave rise to a book entitled
*O Sentido da Nova Logica* (1944). These three books had
little impact within philosophy circles.



From the late 1950s onwards, there were several groups of
mathematicians dedicated to the study of mathematical logic in
 Brazil.[36]
 Edson Farah in the Mathematics Department at USP led some seminars
dedicated to this topic (Hegenberg 1978). He also supervised two
important promoters of analytic philosophy in Brazil: Leonidas
Hegenberg and Newton da Costa.



Hegenberg played a key role in the dissemination of mathematical logic
and philosophy of science through his classes, textbooks, and
 translations.[37]



Newton da Costa studied civil engineering and mathematics at the
Universidade Federal do Parana (UFPR). Despite his lack of
formal training in philosophy, da Costa had studied philosophy on his
own since his
 teens.[38]
 In 1963, he defended a thesis to obtain the chair in Mathematical
Analysis and Higher Analysis of the Faculty of Philosophy, Science,
and Letters at UFPR. That thesis offered an analysis of three
paraconsistent logical systems, i.e., deductive systems that are
inconsistent albeit
 non-trivial.[39]



Although da Costa was not the first to study paraconsistent systems,
he was the first to create several paraconsistent logical systems and
gather a research group with the explicit goal of investigating their
formal properties (Secco and Alvarez
 2022).[40]
 Da Costa's research team became known as the "Curitiba
 group".[41]
 He published some of his first results in the *Comptes rendus de
l'Academie des Sciences* de Paris. The first paper,
published in 1963, was the first research article in logic ever
published by a Brazilian author in an international outlet
(D'Ottaviano and Gomes 2011). Those publications put the
international spotlight on da Costa's work, started to establish
a Brazilian school of logic, and contributed to the development of
paraconsistent logics as a topic of global
 interest.[42]



In 1964, a *coup d'etat* led the members of the
Curitiba group to migrate to Sao Paulo. Da Costa joined the
Institute of Mathematics, Statistics and Computer Science (IMECC) at
the Universidade Estadual de Campinas (Unicamp) in 1968 and the
Institute of Mathematics and Statistics (IME) at USP in
 1970.[43]
 Da Costa's first and most prominent PhD student, Ayda Ignez
Arruda, created her own research group at IMECC (D'Ottaviano and
Gomes 2011). Both groups developed joint projects and published many
joint articles. They also promoted the organization of events that
contributed to the integration of logicians from all Latin America and
other parts of the world. The growth of that community of logicians
led to the creation of the *Sociedade Brasileira de
Logica* (SBL) in
 1979.[44]



The philosophical thread also starts at USP. Since its foundation in
1934, USP had invited many foreign intellectuals to join the nascent
university. Many of them came from France, forming the so-called
"French legion". They implemented a structuralist approach
to the history of philosophy that shaped the way in which the first
and second generations of USP professional philosophers understood
philosophy (Costa 2021). Gilles-Gaston Granger worked at USP from 1947
to 1953 and returned to Brazil on several occasions. During his stay
at USP, Granger taught logic and philosophy of science. A few years
later, he published those lectures in book format as *Logica
e Filosofia das Ciencias* (1955). Although the book offered
an overview of the most recent developments in logic and philosophy of
science, Granger also promoted the structuralist approach (Costa
2021). Hence, it is no accident that the first Brazilian philosophers
who engaged with analytic authors approached philosophy from a
historical-structuralist perspective.



Jose Giannotti--a student of Granger--became a
professor at USP in 1959. Although he initially taught symbolic logic,
he soon became interested in Marx. In his famous book *Origens da
dialetica do trabalho* (1966), Giannotti offered a *sui
generis* interpretation of the antagonism between capital and
labor as a verbal game. In the following years, he studied
Wittgenstein's philosophy (Hegenberg 1978) and published, in
1968, the first Portuguese translation of Wittgenstein's
*Tractatus
 Logico-Philosophicus*.[45]
 At the end of his career, he published a long book that compared
Heidegger's and Wittgenstein's attitudes towards language
(Giannotti
 2018).[46]



Oswaldo Porchat studied at USP and Rennes and taught at USP. In his
famous lecture *O Conflito das Filosofias* (1969), Porchat
argued that each philosopher faces a "conflict of
philosophies": different philosophical systems provide
incompatible answers to philosophical questions about the world.
Lacking an answer to that challenge, he abandoned philosophy and
devoted himself to the study of mathematical logic during a stay at UC
Berkeley (Smith 2018). Porchat returned to USP in 1970 and taught
advanced mathematical logic and philosophy of science. Those courses
had a great impact on his students. He also regained interest in
philosophy and led a research group dedicated to modal logic
(Hegenberg 1978). After publishing a polemical article against
historicism in philosophy of science (Porchat 1974), Porchat explored
two different solutions to the conflict of philosophies: a commonsense
solution that relied on key works from the analytic canon such as
Moore and Strawson, and a skeptical solution inspired by an innovative
interpretation of Ancient Greek skepticism (especially Sextus
Empiricus), and building on the work of Quine and Ryle, and
philosophers of science such as Popper and Lakatos. The result is
called "neo-Pyrrhonism" (Porchat
 2006).[47]



After his stay at UC Berkeley, Porchat envisioned creating a center
analogous to UC Berkeley's *Group in Logic and Methodology of
Science*. His initiative faced political resistance at USP, so he
took his project to Unicamp (D'Ottaviano and Gomes 2011). The
*Centro de Logica, Epistemologia e Historia da
Ciencia* (CLE) was finally born in 1977. Its main goal was
to promote research in logic, epistemology, philosophy of science, and
interdisciplinary studies. It initially focused on the organization of
seminars and scientific meetings, the promotion of academic exchanges
with other groups and institutions in Brazil and abroad, and the
publication of periodicals and books (D'Ottaviano and Gomes
2011). Many participants in the logic thread joined CLE either as
permanent or associated members. There was also a group dedicated to
the philosophy of natural sciences (such as physics and biology),
another group devoted to the philosophy of human sciences (psychology,
psychoanalysis, and sociology), and a few members interested in
philosophy of mind and philosophy of language (D'Ottaviano,
Carnielli and Alves
 1996).[48]



CLE created different journals. Porchat founded *Manuscrito* in
1978, which later became one of the main outlets for analytic
philosophy in Latin
 America.[49]
 Zeljko Loparic created *Cadernos de Historia e
Filosofia da Ciencia* in 1980. The *Journal of
Non-Classical Logics* followed in
 1982.[50]
 In 1987, CLE started to publish books on logic, history of
philosophy, and epistemology and methodology of science. Until the
early 2000s, CLE contributed to the development of specialized courses
and a graduate program in logic and philosophy of science at the
Philosophy Department of Unicamp. That program trained many subsequent
generations of analytic philosophers from Brazil and other Latin
American countries. Since its creation, CLE has played a decisive role
in gathering Brazilian and Latin American philosophers and
internationalizing Brazilian work in logic and analytic
philosophy.



There were other philosophical developments roughly contemporaneous
with those from Sao Paulo in other states. For reasons of
space, only a few developments in Rio de Janeiro will be
mentioned.



Euryalo Cannabrava published *Elementos de Metodologia
Filosofica* and *Introducao a
Filosofia Cientifica* in 1956 and *Ensaios
Filosoficos* in 1957. Those books presented hitherto
unfamiliar ideas from the analytic canon. Other philosophers from Rio
also showed an early interest in Frege, the second Wittgenstein, and
ordinary language philosophy. Paulo Alcoforado worked at the
Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ) from 1963 to 1998.
Although most of his work was in the history of philosophy, he
translated into Portuguese some works by Frege in the late 1970s and
Simpson's *Formas logicas, realidad y significado*
in 1976. In 1980, he also published an introductory article to
ordinary language philosophy that helped develop a tradition of work
in ordinary language philosophy in Rio. Mario Guerreiro joined UFRJ in
1978. He taught theory of knowledge, philosophy of language, and
metaphysics. He wrote about common sense, Wittgenstein, and skepticism
(Guerreiro 1999). Guido Antonio de Almeida worked at the
Pontificia Universidade Catolica de Rio de Janeiro
(PUC-RJ) from 1972 to 1981. Trained in Husserl's phenomenology,
he taught graduate classes on speech acts and the second Wittgenstein.
Daniel Vanderveken, an expert on speech acts, also visited Rio during
those years (Hegenberg
 1978).[51]



In the 1970s, analytic philosophy started to spread throughout the
country. At least two factors explain this phenomenon. First, many
graduate programs of philosophy were created in Brazil in the 1970s
(Brito 2008). Second, the number of scholarships to pursue
postgraduate studies in Brazil and abroad increased dramatically from
the early 1970s to the late 1990s (Mazza
 2009).[52]
 Many Brazilian philosophers benefited from those public policies.



The expansion of analytic philosophy took many forms. Many Brazilians
received training at analytic centers abroad and introduced topics
from the analytic tradition at various Brazilian
 universities.[53]
 Philosophers trained in the Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro
groups moved to other states and promoted work in analytic
 philosophy.[54]
 Foreign professors with training in analytic philosophy also joined
Brazilian
 universities.[55]
 As a result, many analytic groups started to emerge at various
Brazilian universities from the early 1980s
 onwards.[56]



This expansion led to a fragmentation of philosophical activity in
Brazil. In response, several initiatives emerged to integrate the
dozens of philosophers scattered throughout the Brazilian territory.
The *Associacao Nacional de
Pos-Graduacao em Filosofia* (ANPOF) was
created in 1983. ANPOF sought to prevent the isolation of researchers
and maintain a continuous dialogue amongst philosophers from different
states. It started to organize biennial philosophy meetings structured
around *grupos de trabalho* (GTs), i.e., working groups that
gather senior and young researchers interested in common topics. GTs
offered young researchers the opportunity to be mentored by senior
researchers from different states and develop a network across the
 country.[57]



Many new philosophy journals have appeared since the 1990s. To be
sure, few of those journals are exclusively devoted to analytic
philosophy. However, many of them regularly accept submissions of
analytic works. Their openness to analytic contributions suggests
that, at least since the 1990s, analytic philosophy was normalized
throughout the country.



In the 1990s and early 2000s, several national meetings in analytic
philosophy took place that led to the creation of the *Sociedade
Brasileira de Filosofia Analitica* (SBFA) in 2008 (Brito
 2008).[58]


### 2.4 Colombia (1965--)



*Analytic philosophy has taken time to flourish in Colombia.
However, some analytic authors became part of the philosophical canon
at several universities by the end of the twentieth century. For a
long time, Colombian philosophers saw analytic philosophy either as an
object of study or as a resource to provide argumentative
reconstructions of classical authors. Hence, many Colombian
philosophers whose work has analytic traits are reluctant to
self-identify as analytic philosophers; they are happy to move freely
between different intellectual traditions. The newer generations are
more willing to call themselves "analytic philosophers",
perhaps due to their earlier exposure to analytic philosophy and their
training at centers of analytic philosophy abroad.*



An early appearance of analytic philosophy can be found in a 1964
article by Carlos B. Gutierrez that criticizes
Wittgenstein's solipsism from a phenomenological perspective.
After him, Ruben Sierra, another philosopher trained in
phenomenology, adopted a more sympathetic approach. From the 1970s to
the mid-1980s, Sierra discussed the works of Russell, Frege, Carnap,
Austin, Popper, and Strawson in lectures in the Philosophy Department
at the Universidad Nacional de Colombia in Bogota (UNAL). He
also translated some analytic texts and published several articles. In
his works, he treated analytic philosophy as an exotic object that had
to be introduced and commented upon before it could be assimilated by
his Colombian
 readership.[59]
 Still in the late 1980s, Sierra described himself as a traditional
and speculative philosopher who valued the clarity and argumentative
rigor of analytic philosophy. After 1985, Sierra changed the course of
his intellectual efforts: he tried to reconstruct the fragmentary
tradition of Colombian thought to make it available to human and
social scientists. Sierra is today better known for those
endeavors.



The situation of analytic philosophy started to change in the 1980s
thanks to the work of Madgalena Holguin, Adolfo Leon
Gomez, and Juan Jose Botero.



After a PhD at Columbia University, Holguin joined the
Philosophy Department at UNAL in 1981. She stayed there until 1992.
During those years, Holguin gained a reputation as the first
truly analytic philosopher in the country. She introduced
Wittgenstein's philosophy in her classes, supervised many theses
on that topic, published a few translations of analytic texts, and
wrote a few articles on Wittgenstein's philosophy. Her main
contribution is her book *Wittgenstein y el escepticismo*. In
that text, she offers an interpretation of *On Certainty* as
providing a "therapeutic dissolution" of skepticism. On
her reading, Wittgenstein holds that the skeptical problematic
originates from our misunderstanding of the contrasts between
appearance and reality, the subjective and the objective, the internal
and the external, and the private and the public. Holguin
exerted great influence on analytic and non-analytic philosophers
 alike.[60]



While Holguin was active in Bogota, Gomez was the
main representative of analytic philosophy at Universidad del Valle in
Cali. He was active there from the late 1970s to the early 2000s.
Gomez tried to develop a comprehensive understanding of speech
acts inspired by Austin and Searle. He combined that account with
Perelman's theory of argumentation, insisted on the primacy of
practical reason over formal logic, and explored the ramifications of
that framework in the legal, ethical, and literary domains
(Gomez 1991, 1997a, 1997b). Although Gomez was a pioneer
of philosophy in Colombia, he did not leave many
 students.[61]



From the late 1980s to the late 1990s, analytic philosophy slowly
became part of the philosophical canon at UNAL. Moreover, the
production of analytic works grew considerably. It is also during that
period that we find the first analytic works that moved away from
exegesis to the study of philosophical problems themselves
(Rodriguez 2002). In a paper from 1987, Juan Jose
Botero, a phenomenologist by training, argued that one should study
sense, not by focusing on linguistic meaning, but on the constitutive
role of mental
 states.[62]
 This and other works opened the door to philosophy of mind in
Colombia, one of the most-developed analytic areas in the country.



Analytic philosophy was established at UNAL throughout the 1990s.
Several philosophers contributed to this development.



In the early 1990s, Jaime Ramos, Raul Melendez,
Alejandro Rosas, and Luis Eduardo Hoyos joined UNAL's Philosophy
Department. Ramos and Botero created a research group in philosophy of
mind. Ramos had worked on cognitivist philosophy of mind, but
subsequently focused on Wittgenstein and social philosophy. One of his
most significant articles used Wittgenstein's remarks on
seeing-as to provide an account of mental phenomena as having three
mutually irreducible aspects: physical, psychological, and social
(Ramos 2001). Melendez, a mathematician by training, pursued
the tradition of Wittgenstein scholarship initiated by Holguin.
However, he focused on topics like truth and the philosophy of
 mathematics.[63]
 Contrary to Ramos and Melendez, Rosas and Hoyos started their
careers as Kant scholars. Analytic philosophy featured in their work
as a tool to provide analytic reconstructions of Kant's
philosophy. Rosas defended a reading of Kant's transcendental
philosophy inspired by Strawson (Rosas
 1996).[64]
 Hoyos wrote a pioneering work on the skeptical reception of
Kant's philosophy. He argued that the skeptical debates of the
late eighteenth century in Germany anticipated subsequent themes and
arguments from Ayer, Moore, Strawson, and Stroud (Hoyos
 2001).[65]



The arrival of Ignacio Avila, William Duica, and Adrian Cussins
at the turn of the twentieth century gave analytic philosophy at UNAL
a new boost. Much of Avila's work has focused on a
Kantian theme: the constitutive links between objectivity,
subjectivity, and spatiality. Contrary to Rosas and Hoyos,
Avila has pursued his work in dialogue with contemporary
philosophy of perception (Avila 2014, 2015). Duica has made
contributions to epistemology, notably the realism/anti-realism debate
and relativism from a Davidsonian perspective (Duica 2014). In the
early 1990s, Cussins developed a theory of non-conceptual content that
established a constitutive link between perceptual experience and
action (Cussins 1990, 1992). Since Cussins' arrival in Colombia
in the 2000s, his theory has had a great impact on a new generation of
analytic
 philosophers.[66]



The Universidad de Los Andes started to gain prominence as a center
for analytic philosophy in the early 2010s. After joining the
Philosophy Department in 2002, Andres Paez sought to
institutionalize the teaching of logic and consolidate a group in
analytic
 philosophy.[67]
 Paez has been a pioneer in legal epistemology and the
philosophy of AI in the region (Paez 2009, 2014, 2019). With
Carlos Cardona from Universidad El Rosario, he organizes
*PHILOGICA*, a series of international conferences that have
contributed to the training of students. Santiago Amaya has managed to
attract international funding to consolidate a community around the
philosophy of action and moral psychology, organizing international
workshops and summer schools. This group has trained a new generation
of philosophers that have pursued their careers abroad.



While there is no journal exclusively devoted to analytic philosophy
in Colombia, well-established venues like *Ideas y Valores*
(Bogota), *Praxis Filosofica* (Cali), and
*Estudios de Filosofia* (Medellin) regularly
publish papers in the analytic
 tradition.[68]


### 2.5 Other Countries


#### 2.5.1 Peru



Analytic philosophy was introduced by Francisco Miro Quesada
and Augusto Salazar Bondy at the Universidad Nacional Mayor de San
Marcos in
 Lima.[69]
 In 1946, Miro Quesada published one of the first textbooks of
mathematical logic in Latin America. In subsequent work, he offered a
formal analysis of the concept of understanding. He thought of
philosophy as having two sides: a systematic side that seeks to
develop theories and a critical side that connects philosophy with
social
 life.[70]
 In the 1980s, Miro Quesada and Alberto Cordero created a
philosophy program at the Universidad Cayetano de Heredia with a
strong concentration in philosophy of science (Valdes and
Fernandez
 2009).[71]



Salazar Bondy published translations of Moore and Wittgenstein in 1961
and, since the mid-1960s, a series of articles on evaluative language,
collected in his book *Para una filosofia del valor*
 (1971).[72]
 Subsequently, Salazar Bondy advocated for the liberation of Latin
American countries (Valdes and Fernandez 2009) and
joined a national committee to reform Peruvian education
(Salmeron 1991a).



From 1963 to 1987, Edgar Guzman Jorquera worked at the
Universidad Nacional de San Agustin. He defended the view that
existence is a predicate and tried to reconcile Tarski's
disquotational theory of truth with a correspondence theory of truth.
His papers were collected in a posthumous, two-volume book entitled
*Existencia y realidad* (2002) (Quintanilla 2003).



Apart from these isolated philosophers who left no students, it is
only in the twentieth-first century that one finds a nascent analytic
community at two institutions in Peru. At the Pontificia Universidad
Catolica del Peru, Pablo Quintanilla is the head of an
interdisciplinary group dedicated to the philosophies of language and
mind (*Grupo Mente y Lenguaje*). Victor Krebs has
conducted research on Wittgenstein and aesthetics. More recently,
Eduardo Villanueva has focused on philosophy of language and
philosophy of
 logic.[73]
 At the Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos, a small group led by
Oscar Garcia Zarate created the *Centro de estudios
de filosofia analitica* (CESFIA) in 2006. CESFIA
edits the journal *Analitica*.


#### 2.5.2 Chile



In Chile, there has been a steady interest in mathematical logic since
the 1940s (Gracia 1984). Juan Rivano introduced symbolic logic in 1955
and Gerold Stahl developed the area in the 1960s (Stahl 1956, 1960).
Rolando Chuaqui is, however, the most influential logician from Chile.
In Chuaqui (1965), he offered a novel interpretation of probability
based on the concepts of possibility and logical
 truth.[74]



Roberto Torretti made an early impact with a well-regarded book on
Kant published in 1967. At that time, he also showed some interest in
analytic philosophy. He published review articles of Quine's
*From a Logical Point of View* and Ayer's *Logical
Positivism* and two articles on Wittgenstein (Torretti 1961,
1968). Alfonso Gomez Lobo--who had studied with Ernst
Tugendhat in Germany--published a translation of texts by Frege
in 1972. Gomez Lobo and Torretti were exiled to the United
States and Puerto Rico respectively.



From the 1980s to the 1990s, there were only a couple of researchers
devoted to analytic philosophy in
 Chile.[75]
 It is noteworthy, however, that Ernst Tugendhat was a visiting
professor at the Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile from
1992 to 1996. During that time, he also gave many talks and lectures
in other Latin American countries. These visits led to several
translations of his works into Spanish that influenced the development
of analytic philosophy in the Andean
 countries.[76]



In the twenty-first century, analytic philosophy in Chile has grown
considerably. Many philosophers from younger generations have
completed graduate studies abroad and joined Chilean universities
afterwards. Some of these philosophers are Eduardo Fermandois
(philosophy of language, Wittgenstein,
 metaphilosophy),[77]
 Wilfredo Quezada (logic, philosophy of mathematics), Andres
Bobenrieth (paraconsistent logics, logical pluralism, philosophy of
law), Jose Tomas Alvarado (metaphysics), Claudia
Munoz (philosophy of mind), Francisco Pereira (Hume,
perception,
 consciousness),[78]
 and Pablo Lopez-Silva (philosophy of mind, philosophy of
psychiatry). The recent growth of Chilean analytic philosophy is
reflected in the organization of the *Jornadas Rolando Chuaqui
Kettlun* and the colloquium *Lenguaje y
Cognicion*.


#### 2.5.3 Puerto Rico



Ludwig Schajowicz, an Austrian student of Karl Buhler and Moritz
Schlick, joined the Universidad de Puerto Rico as a visiting professor
in 1947. Shortly after, he contributed to creating the Philosophy
Department and the graduate program in philosophy. He also founded the
journal *Dialogos* in
 1964.[79]
 Roberto Torretti joined the Universidad de Puerto Rico in 1970 and
worked there until his retirement. During his Puerto Rican phase, he
wrote his two landmark studies in the history and philosophy of
science: *Philosophy of Geometry from Riemann to
Poincare* (1978) and *Relativity and Geometry*
 (1983).[80]
 Torretti also became the editor of *Dialogos*,
transforming it into one of the most prestigious journals in the
continent (Dussel et al. 2009; Salmeron 1991a). Some members of
the Philosophy Department at the Universidad de Puerto Rico have
pursued work in the analytic
 tradition.[81]


#### 2.5.4 Uruguay



Although Carlos Vaz Ferreira is not clearly an analytic
 philosopher,[82]
 he influenced Latin American analytic philosophy in two ways. First,
his broad understanding of logic has had a late impact in the work of
several Uruguayan philosophers with an analytic bent. Prominent
examples are Carlos Pereda and Eduardo Piacenza (Piacenza 2015).
Second, Vaz Ferreira promoted the creation of the Faculty of
Humanities and Sciences at the Universidad de la Republica in
1946, where analytic philosophy developed a few years later. From 1953
to 1974, Ezra Heymann--a Kant scholar--introduced Frege and
Austin, and taught logic at the Universidad de la
 Republica.[83]
 During that same period, Mario Otero, who had previously spent some
time at the University at Buffalo in New York, went to Buenos Aires to
write a PhD thesis under Mario Bunge's supervision, and then
continued his postgraduate studies in Paris and the United States,
where he worked with Quine and Putnam. Otero went into exile in Mexico
from 1974 to 1980, where he contributed to the development of
philosophy of science at IIFs and Universidad Autonoma
Metropolitana-Iztapalapa. With the return of democracy, Otero went
back to Uruguay, and focused on the history of logic and philosophy of
science. His student Lucia Leiwowicz has pursued the same line
of research. Also exiled in the 1970s, never to return to Uruguay,
were Javier Sasso, Eduardo Piacenza, and Carlos Pereda. Sasso and
Piacenza went to Venezuela and Pereda to IIFs (for further details,
see
 Section 2.5.5
 and
 Section 2.2).



Currently, the most prominent philosopher in Uruguay is Carlos Enrique
Caorsi, who has worked in philosophy of language with an emphasis on
Davidson's philosophy. There is also a new generation of
philosophers based at the Universidad de la Republica working
in philosophy of mind, cognitive science, deep disagreement,
rationality, and scientific change. They include Victoria Lavorerio
and Ignacio Cervieri. With Pablo Melogno, they created the *Grupo
de Estudios Sociales de la Ciencia y la Tecnologia*
(GESCyT).


#### 2.5.5 Venezuela



In the 1940s, Juan David Garcia Bacca received an invitation to
create the School of Philosophy at the Universidad Central de
Venezuela, the first center for the professional study of philosophy
in the country (Dussel et al. 2009). The school started its activities
in 1946. Garcia Bacca, though not an analytic philosopher
himself, taught mathematical logic, philosophy of science, and
introduced some authors from the analytic tradition. Garcia
Bacca stayed there until his retirement in 1971.



Juan Nuno, one of Garcia Bacca's students, wrote
some analytic
 works.[84]
 In 1965, he published *Sentido de la filosofia
contemporanea* (1965), where he offered an interpretation
of Marxism and logical empiricism as transformative movements. Like
his Argentinian and Mexican peers, Nuno saw analytic philosophy
as a means to steer philosophy in the direction of a coherent and
scientific investigation, and as a critical activity, opposing the
construction of closed, philosophical
 systems.[85]
 In the 1970s, Nuno was chair of the School of Philosophy.
During those years, he and his colleagues founded a graduate program
in logic and philosophy of science (1975), the journal *Semestre de
filosofia* (1977), and the *Asociacion Venezolana
de Epistemologia* (1979).



In the 1970s, several Uruguayan philosophers emigrated to Venezuela:
Ezra Heymann, Ernesto Battistella, Eduardo Piacenza, and Javier Sasso.
Battistella published logic textbooks, and *Seleccion de
textos de Gottlob Frege* (1971). He endorsed a view of philosophy
as a critical activity and gave logic a central role as an instrument
to clarify our imprecise concepts (Ramis 1978). Since the 1990s, there
has been a group of philosophers that still focus on mathematical
logic, set theory, and the foundations of
 mathematics.[86]
 Piacenza taught formal logic at different universities in Carabobo
and Caracas. In the late 1980s, he moved away from formal logic, and
focused on argumentation
 theory.[87]
 While he was working at Universidad Catolica Andres
Bello, he created *Cuadernos Venezolanos de Filosofia*
in 1989 and co-founded an MA program in philosophy. He also created a
research group dedicated to the study of argumentation theory and
informal logic. That group is still
 active.[88]
 Sasso worked at various Venezuelan universities before being
appointed at Universidad Simon Bolivar, where he worked
from 1988 to 1997. He regularly taught Moore, Russell, Wittgenstein,
Ryle, Strawson, and other analytic philosophers. He was chair of the
Philosophy Department and the editor-in-chief of *Revista
Venezolana de Filosofia* from 1993 to 1997. He combined his
analytic orientation with an interest in the history of Latin American
 philosophy.[89]



Vicenzo Lo Monaco studied with Garcia Bacca, Nuno,
Heymann, and Battistella. He has published articles and books in
logic, philosophy of language, methodology, and philosophy of science.
His work in philosophy of language focuses on Davidson's
philosophy, proper names, and ontological commitment. He re-founded
the journal *Episteme NS* in 1983, which progressively turned
analytic. From the same generation, Pedro Lluveres worked on the
history of science and philosophy. He wrote a fine book entitled
*Ciencia y escepticismo. Aproximaciones a Descartes*
(1976).



Since the 1990s, there has been a group that conducts research in
mathematical logic and set theory. It originates with Carlos di
Prisco, a mathematician from the Universidad Central de Venezuela. His
student Franklin Galindo introduced first-order logic and its
metatheory and various trends in philosophy of mathematics in the
Philosophy Department at the same university. Galindo's students
have pursued this line of research as
 well.[90]
[91]


#### 2.5.6 Costa Rica



At the Universidad de Costa Rica, two analytic philosophers are worth
mentioning: Claudio Gutierrez and Luis Camacho.
Gutierrez developed most of his work from the late 1960s to the
late 1980s. He published mostly in logic, but also in epistemology,
philosophy of science, and AI (Gutierrez 1974, 1982). Luis
Camacho published reviews and articles on Wittgenstein and
epistemology in the 1970s. Max Freund, from the next generation, has
worked on the logics of sortals, modal logic, and on the logical,
computational, and philosophical consequences of conceptualism (Freund
1992, 2001, 2018). He has also contributed to the development of the
graduate program in cognitive science.



There are almost no visible traces of analytic philosophy
in Latin American countries not mentioned in this historical
 survey.[92]
 Their political, historical, and economic circumstances might explain
this absence. Some of those countries have endured the effects of
civil wars, dictatorships, and depressed economies. Under those
circumstances, the study of philosophy in any of its forms is not the
first priority.


## 3. Original Contributions by Latin American Analytic Philosophers



Section 2
 approached Latin American analytic philosophy from a historical
perspective. This section presents some original contributions by
analytic philosophers working in the region regardless of any
diachronic considerations. It discusses three types of original
contributions: novel contributions to academic debates, novel
contributions to the public sphere, and autochthonous research
avenues. Novel contributions to academic debates include either
uncommon but interesting claims that challenge entrenched views in
international scholarship, or defenses of more traditional claims from
unusual perspectives.
 Section 3.1
 presents some instances from the philosophies of language and mind.
Novel contributions to the public sphere comprise applications of
analytic tools to address moral and political issues that are tied to
the sociopolitical circumstances of Latin American countries. Applied
ethics, bioethics, and philosophy of law are three areas where this
form of originality can be found
 (Section 3.2).
 Finally, autochthonous research avenues refer to debates that
originated in Latin America and could have a significant impact
worldwide.
 Section 3.3
 offers some examples from metaphilosophy.



For reasons of space, the following discussion is limited in three
ways. First, it does not cover some areas of analytic philosophy that
either are insufficiently represented in the region (metaphysics) or
are already covered by other entries (epistemology, logic, philosophy
of science, political philosophy) (see the entries
 Philosophy of Science in Latin America,
 Epistemology in Latin America,
 Skepticism in Latin America,
 and
 Liberalism in Latin America).
 Second, it does not offer an exhaustive selection of contributions.
The aim is to present a small but representative sample. The
interested reader can find references to other significant
contributions in the footnotes. Third, it does not critically assess
the merits of each contribution. Instead, it provides sufficient
information to show why each contribution is worthy of
consideration.


### 3.1 Philosophy of Language and Mind



Many Latin American analytic philosophers have joined the
referentialist movement that started with Barcan Marcus, Donnellan,
Putnam, Kripke, Kaplan, and others.



A key question for that movement concerns reference fixing: How do
(uses of) linguistic expressions come to have the conventional
referents they have? Gomez-Torrente has offered accounts of
reference fixing for widely discussed terms like definite descriptions
(Gomez-Torrente 2015), proper names, demonstratives, and nouns
for natural kinds (Gomez-Torrente 2019) and less discussed
terms like Arabic numerals, color adjectives (Gomez-Torrente
2019), and quotations (Gomez-Torrente 2013, 2017). His starting
point is a conception of human endeavors according to which
"truth is something we pursue and very often achieve"
(Gomez-Torrente 2019, 9). Since truth depends on successful
reference, a theory of reference should ensure that, in some central
areas of discourse, our (uses of) linguistic expressions successfully
refer. To this end, one should think of the theory of reference as
intertwined with metaphysics and epistemology. Metaphysically, one
should not think of the referents of referential expressions as
peculiar and inaccessible entities. Epistemically, one should only
posit reference-fixing conventions that humans can plausibly follow.
Although shared reference-fixing conventions play a role in the
explanation of communication, one should not construe (many of) them
as descriptive senses. Rather than trying to offer necessary and
sufficient conditions that fix the reference of any possible use of an
expression, one should settle for conventions that provide roughly
sufficient conditions for reference that work for some central uses
and leave less central uses
 indeterminate.[93]



Marco Ruffino has made another contribution to the referentialist
movement. Kripke (1980) famously argued that his views on proper names
made room for contingent truths that are a priori knowable. Let
"*S*" be a particular stick used to conventionally
establish what we call "meter" and
"*t*0" the time at which the convention
was established. Consider now an utterance of (M):



(M)
The length of *S* at *t*0 is one meter
long.


For Kripke, (M) expresses a contingent truth because *S* could
be longer or shorter than it actually is. And it is a priori knowable
because the baptizer only needs to know the convention expressed by
"the length of *S* at
*t*0"--with no reliance on experience. A
problem for Kripke's view arises when one asks a metaphysical
question: If (M) refers to an independently existing truth-maker, how
could one possibly know it a priori? Ruffino (2022) has tried to meet
this challenge by taking seriously the idea that many contingent a
priori truths arise from stipulations. Building on speech-act theory,
Ruffino submits that cases like (M) originate from a specific type of
speech act that creates its own truth-maker. Consider a priest's
utterance of "I declare you husband and wife". If
successful, this declarative illocutionary act (Searle and Vanderveken
1985) "automatically creates an alignment between word and world
[...] because the act itself brings about a new fact that
verifies it" (Ruffino 2022, 161). Since this new fact does not
exist independently of the stipulation, there is no mystery as to how
it could be known a
 priori.[94]



Referential views like Gomez-Torrente's and
Ruffino's face a problem: many of the expressions whose
reference they have tried to elucidate have non-referential uses. This
problem has led many authors to reject the traditional view of proper
names, indexicals, and demonstratives as referential expressions. For
example, some authors have argued that complex demonstratives are
quantificational phrases (King 2000; Neale 2008; Lepore and Ludwig
2000), and others have claimed that proper names are common nouns or
predicates (Burge 1973; Fara 2015). Ezcurdia (2017, 2022) develops a
referential view that tackles the problem of non-referential uses.
According to her *referential functionalism*, what makes an
expression referential is its *function*. More specifically,
*e* is a referential expression just in case *e* has the
function of communicating singular thoughts. On Ezcurdia's view,
this function explains why humans still employ proper names,
indexicals, and demonstratives. Given that a function can go
unfulfilled, referential expressions can have non-referential uses as
well. Ezcurdia's referential functionalism has two consequences:
referential expressions are systematically ambiguous, and a
semantically complex expression like "that taco" can be
genuinely
 referential.[95]



Slurs have also featured in recent Latin American philosophy of
language. A slur like "spic" is a word that conveys
derogatory feelings for members of a certain group of people. Orlando
and Saab (2019, 2020a, 2020b) defend a version of a dual analysis of
paradigmatic slurs. Following Kaplan (1999), they associate slurs with
a dualistic semantics: a truth-conditional meaning and an expressive
 meaning.[96]
 What distinguishes their view from others is their account of
expressive meaning. They think of expressive meaning as determined by
a culturally determined stereotype, i.e., a set of schematic,
simple-minded, oversimplified, and mostly false beliefs involving a
prejudicial view of the corresponding group. Thus, the stereotype for
"spic" is a complex concept that encodes a global negative
valence: illegal, with a spanish accent, poor,
untrustworthy, family-oriented, good dancer, prone to laziness,
 etc.[97]
 Orlando and Saab model those stereotypes on Wittgenstein's
(1953) notion of family resemblance. Thus, stereotypes do not offer
necessary and sufficient conditions that determine the corresponding
 extensions.[98]
[99]



Several Latin American philosophers have investigated the role of
language in the human mind. Their work has been influenced by
Wittgenstein and, in some cases, by empirical findings from cognitive
science.



At least since Black (1955), analytic philosophers have tried to
explain how metaphors work. Fermandois (2000, 2008, 2009, 2010) argues
that many analytic accounts of metaphor have trouble explaining our
understanding and cognitive uses of "strong metaphors".
Very roughly, strong metaphors are highly surprising and rich, so they
cannot be easily paraphrased in a finite number of
 sentences.[100]
 An example of a strong metaphor is Wittgenstein's view of
language as a toolbox. While semantic accounts explain metaphor by
positing a change in the meaning of sentences, pragmatic accounts rely
on Gricean intentions (Grice 1989) and speech acts (Searle 1969) to
derive a few, true propositional contents from the literal content
associated with an utterance of a sentence. Insofar as these
approaches depict metaphoric interpretation as an almost automatic
derivation of a few propositional contents, they have a hard time
accommodating the open-ended character of strong metaphors and the
active role of the interpreter in building an adequate interpretation
of those metaphors. They also overlook two important features of
strong metaphors, namely, that they invite the formation of further
metaphoric thoughts and routinely exploit non-propositional elements
like experiences of "seeing-as" and emotions. In a more
positive vein, Fermandois offers a characterization of strong
metaphors as tools that show new ways of seeing things, suggesting
that this role is best served if one reintroduces non-propositional
elements, and supplements those non-propositional elements with a
*sui generis* form of non-propositional, context-bound
correctness.



In many everyday conversations, a hearer can automatically, fluently,
and directly determine the intuitive truth-conditions of an utterance
made in their mother tongue. Leclerc (2009, 2012) has made some
contributions to the elucidation of this phenomenon, which he dubs
"spontaneous linguistic understanding" (SLU). To begin
with, he offers a contrastive characterization of SLU. He contends
that SLU is a kind of occurrent understanding that differs from other
phenomena, such as the understanding one can get from a foreign
language one does not fully understand or the "detached"
knowledge one can acquire of the content of an utterance from a
translator. Furthermore, Leclerc argues that two influential programs,
Davidson's (1984) and Grice's (1989), are inadequate to
characterize the competences underlying SLU. Finally, building on
ideas from other philosophers, he offers the bare bones of an account
of the competences underlying SLU. Very roughly, SLU is a kind of
occurrent understanding that involves experience, it is not
underwritten by propositional knowledge but by a battery of
dispositions, and it is ultimately grounded in human understanding of
actions and
 situations.[101]



What are the most distinctive features of human languages? Scotto
(2017, 2019a, 2019b, 2020) thinks that human languages are
*multimodal* and *semiotically heterogeneous* systems. A
long-standing view thinks of speech as linked to a single modality:
sound production in speakers and audition in hearers. Building on
findings from cognitive science and an original reading of
Wittgenstein's remarks on meaning experiences, Scotto argues
that the unimodal view overlooks the key role of vision and hands in
the use of facial expressions and gestures in everyday communication,
bodily posture, and speakers' proprioception of the muscles,
tongue, and lips they use in the production of speech. Her focus on
the multimodal character of human languages casts doubts on some
entrenched views of language. Consider one such view. If one thinks of
language production and interpretation as unimodal, it is tempting to
endorse the view that words are linked to their contents by convention
(as did Hockett 1960, Locke 1690, and de Saussure 1983). But, if
languages exploit many other modalities with higher iconic potential,
it is more plausible to think of large portions of languages as
connecting with their referents and the emotions they express through
various forms of similarity between signs, referents, and the users of
those
 signs.[102]
[103]



Since Premack and Woodroff (1978), many philosophers, ethologists,
cognitive scientists, and neuroscientists have investigated the human
abilities involved in the way we understand each other in everyday
life. During the boom of cognitivism, the Theory-Theory and the
Simulation Theory monopolized the discussion (Davies and Stone 1995;
Carruthers and Smith 1996). From a post-cognitivist perspective,
Perez (2005a, 2005b, 2013) defends a Wittgensteinian approach
to psychological concepts and supplements it with a pre-linguistic
understanding of the mental in second-person interactions. Her
analysis of those interactions gives a pride of place to psychological
states other than belief and insists on the diversity of mental
states. This account has some important consequences. Consider
Jackson's (1982) case of Mary, the brilliant scientist who
apparently learns something new when she leaves her black-and-white
room and sees a red apple (see the entry
 Qualia: The Knowledge Argument).
 A popular response says that Mary acquires a phenomenal concept she
previously lacked (Alter and Walter 2006). Perez (2011) offers
an account of the possession conditions of phenomenal concepts that
explains why Mary lacked the relevant phenomenal concept before she
left the room. In joint work with Gomila (Perez and Gomila
2022), Perez offers a post-cognitivist, empirically informed
account of the second-person perspective as fundamental to the
development of mental concepts where emotions and direct perception
play a key
 role.[104]
[105]



Many analytic philosophers active in Latin America have joined the
debate on the nature of phenomenal consciousness.



When you see a red patch, there is something it is like for you to
undergo that experience (Nagel 1974). Many theories of phenomenal
consciousness have focused on the problem of qualities, which consists
in characterizing the qualitative character that distinguishes an
experience as of a red patch from--let us say--an experience
as of listening to a birdsong. Sebastian (2012, 2020,
forthcoming) has focused on an equally important but less discussed
issue, namely, the fact that experiences have subjective character. He
has put forward two hypotheses. First, if one unpacks the subjectivity
of experience in representational terms, one will be able to use
conceptual tools from teleosemantic theories of content to offer a
naturalistic explanation of subjective character (see the entry
 Teleological Theories of Mental Content).
 Second, if one analyzes the representational content of subjective
character as a perspectival *de se* representation analogous to
that put forward by Lewis (1979), one will be able to offer an
accurate characterization of altered states of consciousness and draw
a boundary between conscious and unconscious processes.



Another topic of interest has been metacognition. Consider the
following example. Just after the host of a TV show asks,
"What's the capital of Bolivia?", Anna rushes to
press the button before she has even retrieved the answer. Her action
was motivated by a "feeling of knowing". This and other
"metacognitive feelings" have been studied in cognitive
science for decades. However, philosophers only started to
systematically examine them in the 2000s (Dokic 2012; Proust 2012).
Arango-Munoz (2014a) has contributed to this research program
by offering a unified account of metacognitive feelings that
synthetizes earlier work. On his view, metacognitive feelings are
intentional experiences whose object is not transparent to the
subject, they come in non-conceptual and conceptual forms, and they
are underwritten by heuristic mechanisms. His work has opened up new
research avenues. For example, given the opacity of their intentional
object, metacognitive feelings challenge intentionalist views
according to which the phenomenal character of experiences supervenes
on their representational contents (Dretske 2006; Tye 2000).
Metacognitive feelings can also explain how one manages to efficiently
employ external cognitive devices. To illustrate, when one is asked
what the capital of Bolivia is, one must decide whether one retrieves
the information from memory or does a Google search.
Arango-Munoz (2013) thinks that this decision is modulated by
the presence or absence of the feeling of
 knowing.[106]
[107]



In philosophy of action, rationalists hold that agency consists in
acting for reasons, where reasons are understood thinly as an
agent's preferences at the time of acting (Audi 1979; Davidson
1980; Lewis 1989). Amaya (2013) argues that slips are counterexamples
to this view. To illustrate, imagine that Axel has the intention to
drop his child at the daycare on the way to work. However, without
changing his mind, Axel winds up doing something else: he goes
straight to his office and leaves the child unattended for the entire
workday. A few hours later, his child has died of hyperthermia. On the
assumption that Axel is a good parent who cares for his child, his
action does not reveal his preferences at the time. Amaya thinks that
cases like this one are performance mistakes, i.e., mistakes that
arise in the implementation of an agent's intention. His
analysis gives rise to important questions of cognitive architecture:
What are the roles of capacities such as working memory, attention,
and vigilance in performance mistakes? Also, questions of
responsibility: Given that we hold Axel responsible for his
negligence, slips put pressure on the so-called "epistemic
condition for moral responsibility", i.e., the idea that moral
responsibility requires awareness of what one is doing, its
consequences, or its moral significance (Amaya and Doris 2015; Amaya
2022). After all, these forms of awareness are absent in Axel's
slip and other cases of negligence (but see Rudy-Hiller 2019 for
 criticism).[108]


### 3.2 Applied Ethics, Bioethics, and Philosophy of Law



Latin American analytic philosophers have made important contributions
to ethics, political philosophy, and philosophy of law (for overviews,
see Rivera Lopez 2010; Navarro 2010; Vasquez 2012; and
the entry
 Liberalism in Latin America).
 This section presents a few contributions that apply analytic tools
to address moral and political issues that are tied to the
sociopolitical circumstances of Latin American countries.



Abortion is not legal in most Latin American countries. Indeed, many
women have died or been imprisoned due to this fact. However, abortion
was legalized in Mexico City in 2007 and decriminalized by the
National Supreme Court of Justice in 2021. Some analytic philosophers
have played a role in this change. Valdes (2002) critically
examines the arguments of the Catholic Church against abortion. In
Valdes (2001), she calls the public's attention to the
problems that arise from child and adolescent pregnancy and pregnancy
that results from rape. She also offers a critical assessment of the
main arguments for and against the legalization of abortion. She
distinguishes three concepts of a person (a biological concept, a
concept related to a potential person, and a moral concept of a
person), and argues that the concept of a person implicit in pro-life
views--namely, that a person is present at the very moment of
conception--is not the moral concept that matters to this
 debate.[109]



Florencia Luna's views on vulnerability have been influential in
bioethics. For many years, codes of ethics and research ethics
theories adopted a subpopulation approach. They used vulnerability
as a label to refer to subjects of
some groups: women, racial minorities, the poor, the very sick, and so
on. This approach was subject to severe criticism, though. Some
objected that it promotes the creation of stereotypes that cannot be
easily removed, and that reliance on labels does not offer sufficient
protection to vulnerable subjects. After all, it only exhorts
researchers and ethics committees to pay special attention to members
of those groups when recruiting them as subjects in their studies.
Luna (2004, 2009, 2019a) develops an account of vulnerability
that avoids these problems. On her
view, vulnerability is a "layered
concept": one and the same subject can have one or several
layers of vulnerability, those layers are not only determined by the
subject's membership in a group but also by their own context,
and those layers can be modified and--in some
cases--removed. Hence, being a woman does not entail *per
se* being vulnerable. However, being a woman living in a country
that is intolerant to reproductive rights confers on that woman one
layer of vulnerability. If, on top of that, that woman is poor, she
has an extra layer of vulnerability. And so on. Since the layered
concept does not work as a label that singles out an essential
property of members of some groups, it does not promote the creation
of stereotypes. Given that the layered account does not treat vulnerability
as a general and fixed category, it
enables researchers to develop fine-grained analyses of specific
layers of vulnerability and--on a case-by-case basis--take
effective action to mitigate them. For example, in a given country,
women may have trouble negotiating the use of condoms with their
partners. In such cases, the use of the female condom is not an
option. Other contraceptive methods that preserve the secrecy that
women may desire would be preferable. However, the use of those
contraceptive methods might not mitigate another layer of
vulnerability, namely, the risk of HIV-AIDS
 infection.[110]



Carlos Nino is the main representative of the Argentinian school of
philosophy of law. His influential work on human rights was a response
to the human rights violations perpetrated by the "military
juntas" that governed the country from 1976 to 1983: thousands
of people were tortured, assassinated, and subject to enforced
disappearance. As an advisor of Raul Alfonsin--the
Argentinian president from 1983 to 1989--, Nino helped designing
new laws to promote human rights and prevent their violation and
develop a strategy to punish the militaries responsible for human
rights violations during the dictatorship (Malem Sena 1994).
Nino's philosophical work provided a theoretical framework to
justify these
 programs.[111]
 Moreover, Nino himself played a decisive role in their
 implementation.[112]
 Nino defended a form of moral constructivism according to which
morality is a social practice that seeks to overcome conflicts and
favor cooperation through consensus. He thought of moral practice as a
discourse where individuals freely accept principles to guide their
actions and attitudes towards the actions of others. Those principles
enjoy an intrinsic validity that could be used to confer final
justification on human rights independently of any legal order. He
proposed a *principle of the inviolability of the person*,
which prohibits the imposition on humans--against their
will--of sacrifices and privations that do not lead to their own
benefit, a *principle of autonomy of the person*, which
emphasizes a person's capacity to choose freely a model of life
and imposes a limit on any interventions by the State and others, and
a *principle of the dignity of the person*, which says that
humans should be treated in accordance with their own decisions,
intentions, or manifestations of consent. These three principles,
devised in the 1970s and developed in Nino (1984), offered the
theoretical foundation for Alfonsin's legal reforms to
promote human rights and prevent their
 violation.[113]
 As for past violations of human rights by the State, Alfonsin
and his collaborators created a committee to inquire into those crimes
(*Comision Nacional sobre la Desaparicion de
Personas*, CONADEP) and urged the competent bodies to prosecute
and condemn some of the militaries responsible for those crimes (the
*"Juicio a las
 Juntas"*).[114]
 They faced a problem, though: there were so many people involved in
those human rights violations that trying to prosecute them all
involved a serious risk of destabilizing the fragile democratic
institutions and provoking a military *coup*. Nino's
(1985, 1991b) views on punishment proved useful. Given a retributivist
conception of punishment, the right thing to do was to punish them
all. However, Nino opposed that view on the ground that the sum of two
ills (the offender's act and the punishment) could not give rise
to a good. His alternative view was instrumentalist. If punishment was
a means to prevent future human rights violations, one could attain
that goal by punishing a select number of responsible
 agents.[115]



The presence of indigenous peoples in Latin America has given rise to
political, social, and cultural tensions. In the 1990s, the Mexican
philosopher Luis Villoro joined the Zapatist movement against the
exploitation, discrimination, and oppression that indigenous peoples
had suffered for more than 500
 years.[116]
 In a 1997 book, he defended a novel conception of the State inspired
by the idea of community, a form of organization that is key to
indigenous peoples. In this form of social organization, power is
constrained by value and the individual is conceived as part of a
collectivity, without any relation of domination or subordination of
one entity to
 another.[117]
 In a subsequent 2007 book, Villoro defended a moderate
multiculturalism that sought to reconcile the universality of human
rights with the respect and tolerance of cultural diversity. He also
defended a communitarian democracy and urged national states to
respect the self-determination of indigenous peoples.



More recently, some Latin American analytic philosophers have
contributed to the global discussion about the distribution of
vaccines during the Covid-19 pandemic, have helped develop protocols
for the allocation of scarce therapeutic resources (*triage*),
and have discussed the social organization of science during the
 pandemic.[118]


### 3.3 Metaphilosophy



When analytic philosophy was introduced in the region, it generated an
intellectual revolution. So, it is no wonder that many Latin American
analytic philosophers devoted their efforts to thinking about
metaphilosophical issues such as the methods and nature of philosophy,
the social role of philosophy, and more. This section presents two
metaphilosophical issues: professionalization and the language of
philosophy.



Several Latin American philosophers thought of analytic philosophy as
a tool to professionalize philosophy
 (Section 2).
 Against this view, Rabossi (2008) presents some heterodox hypotheses
about philosophy as a discipline. For example, it is tempting to think
of philosophy as a discipline that has been practiced for centuries.
Rabossi rejects this picture: on the basis of a detailed historical
reconstruction, he argues that philosophy as it is practiced today is
the result of a split between philosophy and other theoretical
disciplines in Germany in the nineteenth century. Thus, far from
having an essence that has been preserved for centuries, philosophy as
we know it today is a historically contingent
 practice.[119]



In recent years, other Latin American philosophers have seen the
professionalization of philosophy with suspicion. Hurtado (2012)
argues that professionalization led analytic philosophers to try to
"adjust a small screw in a piece of machinery", and
neglect long-standing questions about human existence, the use of
philosophical tools to improve one's life, and the historical,
cultural, and social context in which one does philosophy in Latin
American countries. Garcia-Carpintero (2012) replies to Hurtado
by offering examples where professionalization in the analytic
tradition has led to philosophical progress about longstanding
problems. Quintanilla (2013) responds that the problems Hurtado
associates with professionalization are not specific to analytic
philosophy. They are not only widespread but also due to the research
policies that dominate global research institutions both in the
humanities and the social and natural sciences.



Last but not least, Latin American analytic philosophers have
discussed the role of language in philosophical practice. Analytic
philosophy has developed for the most part in English-speaking
countries, most analytic works are published in English, and
globalization has compelled Latin American analytic philosophers to
produce philosophy in English. These facts raise the question of
whether Latin American philosophers should abandon their native
language (Spanish or Portuguese) when they do philosophy.
Rodriguez-Pereyra (2013) and Ruffino (2013) think that
pragmatic professional reasons speak in favor of using English as the
new Latin, i.e., a new *lingua franca* for analytic philosophy.
Perez (2013b) and Hurtado (2013) object that this pragmatic
stance overlooks the political, cultural, linguistic, contextual, and
experiential dimensions of language use. To illustrate, the choice of
a specific language can prompt hasty generalizations from a given
language that do not automatically hold for other
 languages.[120]
 A way of avoiding those hasty generalizations is to retain the use of
a plurality of languages in
 philosophy.[121]
 Moreover, the pragmatic argument hinges on a controversial view of
the language-thought interface. If natural languages are not only
tools to communicate ready-made ideas, but media within which humans
shape their own ideas, then the choice of a language can ultimately
have an impact on whether some ideas gain currency and others not.


## 4. Concluding Remarks



Analytic philosophy in Latin America has reached a considerable degree
of originality and impact. The more stable democratic political
regimes of the past forty years have also promoted research, freedom
of expression, and critical thought. Globalization and new
technologies have further contributed to this development.



In the early days, Latin American analytic philosophers were mostly
interested in interacting with their Anglo-Saxon peers. That relation
was usually asymmetric. In the last two decades or so, the situation
has started to change. Many Latin American analytic philosophers have
started to strengthen their links with their Latin American peers and
establish more symmetric relations. The first steps were taken with
the organization of small workshops where Anglo-Saxon and Latin
American philosophers exchanged ideas and discussed each other's
work as equals. In 2006, the project of creating a regional
association for analytic philosophy emerged in Mexico City, when Maite
Ezcurdia introduced the idea to other Latin American colleagues. As a
result, the *Asociacion Latinoamericana de Filosofia
Analitica* (ALFAn) was created in 2007. ALFAn has so far
organized six meetings in different countries. Additionally, it has
ongoing projects to mentor new generations of philosophers and
increase the discussion of analytic works produced within the
region.