Santiago Castro-Gómez is professor of political philosophy at the University of Santo Tomás and the University Javeriana in Bogotá. He was part of the influential intellectual collective modernity/coloniality, and he has been visiting professor at Duke University, the University of Pittsburgh, and the University of Frankfurt. His publications in English include Zero-Point Hubris: Science, Race, and Enlightenment (2021).Andrew Ascherl has translated several works of Latin American critical theory and literary criticism.Linda Martín Alcoff is professor of philosophy at Hunter College, City University of New York.Eduardo Mendieta is professor of philosophy at Pennsylvania State University.

• Foreword: A Principled Pessimist of the Left—Castro-Gomez’s Critique of Latin American Reason, by Linda Martín AlcoffTranslator’s NotePrefaceAcknowledgmentsPrologue to the Second EditionIntroduction: The Othering of Latin America and the Critique of the Critique of Colonial Reason, by Eduardo Mendieta1. Postmodernity’s Challenges to Latin American Philosophy2. Modernity, Rationalization, and Cultural Identity in Latin America3. Populism and Philosophy4. Latin America Beyond the Philosophy of History5. The Aesthetics of the Beautiful in Spanish American Modernism6. Postcolonial Reason and Latin American Philosophy7. The Birth of Latin America as a Philosophical Problem in MexicoAppendix 1. From the History of Ideas to the Localized Genealogy of Practices: An Interview with Santiago Castro-GómezAppendix 2. Santiago Castro-Gómez’s Critique of Latin American Reason: Contemporary ProvocationsNotesBibliographyIndex

Critique of Latin American Reason is one of the pivotal texts in Latin American studies and an obligatory reference for anyone who is interested in approaching critical thinking in the context of the global south. It has changed the conversation about how to do history of ideas in Latin America from a renewed and very timely approach to genealogy and what Castro-Gómez calls, with Foucault, an ontology of the present. If the field of philosophy can recognize that it is in need of a serious critique of its colonial methodologies, this book will be at the center of that undertaking.