Welcome to the Inter-American Institute

A word from our president

1. The idea for this institute was born of a number of intellectual experiences that seemed to me—they still do—disturbing or stimulating enough to arouse reflection and debate within a circle of intellectuals and scholars. The first of these experiences was verifying everywhere that the academic establishment finds it difficult to assimilate and profit from the highest and most remarkable expressions of the philosophy of the second half of the twentieth century. Many decades having passed since their chief works were published, the greatest philosophers of that period still remain practically unknown to the academic universe in general. Here I am referring specifically to Eric Voegelin, Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, Xavier Zubiri, and Bernard Lonergan. This could never have happened, in the first half of the twentieth century, to an Edmund Husserl or to a Karl Jaspers. Something, in this lapse of time, has seriously debilitated the intellectual fiber of the great universities—kindred institutions in peripheral countries having suffered an even greater depauperation. The making of the university apparatus into an instrument for political propaganda had something to do with that, to be sure, but what is of interest here is not to fathom the causes of the said phenomenon but rather to foster attitudes that counterbalance it on the scale of smaller circles of intellectuals and scholars. This institute is one of these circles.

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