Latin American positivism : new historical and philosophical essays / edited by Gregory D. Gilson and Irving W. Levinson.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

The death of positivisms and the birth of Mexican phenomenology / Eduardo Mendieta -- Latin America and logical positivism / Gregory D. Gilson -- The good and the useful together: Columbian positivism in a century of conflict / Meri L. Clark -- From positivism to anti-positivism: some notable continuities / Alexander Stehn -- Why positivism failed in Latin America / Steve Calogero -- Positively disastrous: the Comtian legacy in Mexico / Irving W. Levinson -- Brazil's military positivists: another myth in need of explosion? / R.S. Rose -- The birth of a new political philosophy: religion and positivism in nineteenth-century Brazil / Rodney Rhodes Gallo -- A duke in the court of the bourgeois king: positivism and Porfirismo in the work of Manuel Gutiérrez Nájera / Jóse María Martinez.

Latin American Positivism: New Historical and Philosophical Essays examines the role of positivism in the intellectual and political life of three major nations: Colombia, Brazil, and México. In doing so, the authors first focus on the intellectual linkages and distinctions between Latin American positivists and their European counterparts. Also, they examine the impact of positivist theory on the political cultures of these nations and the more significant impact of the political and socio-economic cultures of those states upon positivist thought. Rather than asserting that the positivist movement was a moving force that reformatted many Latin American modalities, the authors demonstrate that the dynamics of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Latin American societies altered positivism to a greater extent that the positivists altered these nations. The interdisciplinary essays in this collection are written for students and scholars both of philosophy, with its insights into positivism and other modern movements within the discipline, and of history, with its analysis of Latin America's political and socio-economic evolution.--Publisher description.