Carlos Alberto Sánchez on Mexican Philosophy
Philosophy Bites
Nigel Warburton
4.5 • 2K Ratings
🗓️ 2 September 2025
⏱️ 21 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
What is distinctive about Mexican philosophy? How much is it linked to its geopolitical context? Carlos Alberto Sanchez, author of Blooming in the Ruins, a book about major themes in 20th century Mexican philosophy discusses this topic in conversation with David Edmonds.
This episode was supported by the Ideas Workshop, part of Open Society Foundations.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is Philosophy Bites with me David Edmonds and me Nigel Warburton. |
| 0:06.2 | Philosophy Bites is available at www. www.com. |
| 0:10.4 | Is there something distinctive about Mexican philosophy? Not simply philosophy done in Mexico, |
| 0:18.0 | but philosophy that emerges from post-colonial experience in that country. |
| 0:23.0 | Carlos Alberto Sanchez thinks there is. Here, he explains why, and gives us some examples of |
| 0:29.9 | concepts such as Napantla that relate directly to Mexican experience. Carlos Alberto Sanchez, |
| 0:36.8 | welcome to Philosophy Bites. Thank you for having me. |
| 0:39.5 | It's an honor to be here. We're talking today about Mexican philosophy. There are obviously |
| 0:46.2 | philosophers who are Mexican, of course, but I'm interested in what's distinctive about Mexican |
| 0:51.9 | philosophy, which is a different question. So can you say something about that? What, if anything, is distinctive about Mexican philosophy, which is a different question. So can you say something |
| 0:55.3 | about that? What, if anything, is distinctive about Mexican philosophy? Sure. Before I get to that |
| 1:02.0 | part, let me just quickly make a quick distinction between Mexican philosophy and philosophy in Mexico. |
| 1:08.4 | Philosophy has been in Mexico for a long time. In pre-conquest times, particularly |
| 1:12.5 | with the Mexica or the Aztecs, there were a Tlamatini who were wise and consulted about |
| 1:19.5 | and spoke about what we consider philosophical matters in the community. Pre-Hispanic thought was not |
| 1:24.6 | called philosophy only because the term didn't exist it, it wasn't around. |
| 1:28.1 | But there was philosophy. What we understand by philosophy didn't make its official appearance in the |
| 1:33.6 | new world until 1540, which is when the Austrian friar Alonso de la Veracruz held the very first |
| 1:40.7 | philosophy lecture course in the Americas at a small monastery in the town of Tiripatillo in the Mexican state of Michoacan. |
| 1:49.1 | So technically, this is one philosophy in the Americas, as we understand it, appears for the first time in Mexico in 1540. |
| 1:56.2 | It comes to the conquerors and the colonizers, and slowly it starts to change and adapt to the |
| 2:01.3 | realities of the new world. And this adaptation is important for the question that you're asking |
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