Jose Ingenieros

Jose Ingenieros, born Giuseppe Ingegnieri on April 24, 1877 and dying October 31, 1925, was an Argentine physician, pharmacist, positivist philosopher and essayist born in Palermo, Italy, who earned his medical degree from the University of Buenos Aires in 1900 and developed a positivist philosophy drawing on Herbert Spencer and Auguste Comte. His major philosophical work, El hombre mediocre, or The Mediocre Man, published in 1913, explored social and philosophical themes of conformity and moral courage, and his career combined this scholarship with founding the Buenos Aires Institute of Criminology in 1907 and the Argentine Psychological Society in 1908, serving as president of the Argentine Medical Association in 1909, and playing a major role in Argentina's 1918 university reform movement. He was active in the Socialist Party and later communist circles, co-founded the anti-imperialist Union Latinoamericana in 1922, and founded the monthly journal Renovacion in 1925, the year of his death in Buenos Aires.