Samuel Ramos

Samuel Ramos Magana, who lived from 1897 to June 20, 1959, was a Mexican philosopher and writer born in Zitácuaro, Michoacán, who studied at the Colegio de San Nicolás de Hidalgo before pursuing further study at the Sorbonne, the College de France and the Sapienza University of Rome, earning his doctorate from the National Autonomous University of Mexico in 1944 and becoming head of its Faculty of Philosophy and Literature before joining the Colegio Nacional in 1952. His scholarship examined the ontology of Mexican national identity, analyzing the pelado, or urban underclass figure, of the 1920s and 1930s as displaying a machismo that Ramos, drawing on Alfred Adler's psychology, interpreted as an expression of an underlying inferiority complex, an analysis he extended into an early post-revolutionary assessment of Mexican national character as a whole. His works include Filosofia de la vida artistica of 1950, El perfil del hombre y la cultura en Mexico of 1952, translated as Profile of Man and Culture in Mexico, and Hacia un nuevo humanismo of 1962.