Latin American Colonial Scholasticism (the Scholastica Colonialis Project)

Scholastica colonialis (“colonial Scholasticism”) is an investigative project in the history of philosophy concerning the reception and development of Baroque scholasticism in Latin America from the 16th to the beginning of the 19th century. The project covers the period up to the independence processes in Spanish and Portuguese America, from 1809-1810 onwards. As such, the project covers the colonial and viceroyal period in Latin American history. It attempts to describe and interpret the scholastic philosophy that appeared in that period, with a special focus on the adoption of that philosophy in institutions of higher education (convents, seminaries, universities, etc.). It looks at the teaching and documented formulation of philosophical, theological and juridical ideas. The adjective colonialis is a neologism in Latin, highlighting a meaning that (at least partially) differs from the adjective colonicus (-a, -um), which might have led to the misleading expression Scholastica colonica. Both words, however, can be associated with the ancient and medieval urban center of Cologne in today’s Germany and with the human settler (colonus), bound to the land, or with the colonizer of a given land. The term Scholastica colonialis is used to designate a long period of reception and reconfiguration, with the unfolding of the ideas of medieval scholasticism in pre-modern scholasticism (purer scholastic thought) and in modern scholasticism (more eclectic scholastic thought that is compared or connected to modern philosophy) through the following singular perspective: the perspective of its transmission to and adoption and teaching in Catholic institutions in the regions of the Americas under the political control of Spain and Portugal. These processes essentially began with the maritime expansion and “discoveries” by both countries, and lasted up to the chronological limit mentioned above. In those centuries, having passed through processes of domination and colonization, the lands conquered by those two Iberian potencies remained, in different ways, macropolitically speaking, dependent on and controlled by a central European power that was, as a rule, monarchical or imperial. As such, those lands remained dependent on and controlled by the countries that conquered American territories and nations, and these countries culturally influenced their diverse and numerous peoples.