Leopoldo Zea

Leopoldo Zea, born Leopoldo Zea Aguilar in 1912 in Mexico City and died in 2004, was a Mexican philosopher and one of the most influential figures in twentieth century Latin American philosophy, a student of the Spanish exile philosopher Jose Gaos and long associated with the National Autonomous University of Mexico. He is best known for his sustained inquiry into the existence and character of a distinctly Latin American philosophy and identity, beginning with his 1943 study El Positivismo en Mexico, which traced the influence and eventual crisis of positivist thought in Mexico, and developing into a broader philosophy of Latin American history that treated the region's own experience, rather than imported European categories, as the proper starting point for its self understanding. Zea argued for the cultural and intellectual integration of Latin America against both colonial dependency and utopian abstraction, and he is regarded as a founding figure of the philosophy of Latin American identity and history as a distinct field of inquiry.