Presentation

Abstract

Dossier Philosophy and politics in Argentina

We offer in this dossier two articles that coincide in the importance of analyzing Argentine philosophical writings -and those of other latitudes- in their contexts of production. The first one was prepared by Martín Forciniti, who focuses on the political dimension of Rodolfo Kusch's essays of the sixties. In the second article, Martín Cremonte returns to the polemic National Congress of Philosophy of 1980 to analyze the role played by the vindication of Socrates' philosophy presented by one of the organizers of the event, Francisco Olivieri.
Rodolfo Kusch (1922-1979) studied philosophy at the University of Buenos Aires during the 1940s. After graduating, he worked as a professor and at the same time began a creative reflection that made use of Heidegger's philosophy and the anthropologies of symbolic forms to illuminate the "thought of deep America". To his voluminous individual work he added between 1971-1975 the collective bet for a Philosophy of Liberation. In this Kusch stood out together with Arturo Roig, Juan Carlos Scannone and Enrique Dussel, among others.
This year 2022 marks the 100th anniversary of Kusch's birth and the centenary has motivated several academic events aimed at highlighting the relevance of his philosophical production. In view of this, Martín Forciniti proposes that we dwell on the second edition, published in 1973, of El pensamiento indígena y popular en América. Its purpose is to discuss with the studies that have been recovering the political dimension of Kusch's work, since they coincide in raising this dimension from the present, suspending, as the title proposes, the "ideological function of philosophical discourse". Since the 1950s Kusch assimilated his sought-after indigenous and popular thought to Peronism. Thus, the historical contextualization that Forciniti undertakes must review the latest studies on the Peronist left and right, and this leads him to conclude that the danger of "misappropriation" and "Marxist infiltration" that Kusch denounced at the time confronted both the Peronist Youth and the Tendency and offered the growing Peronist right an indigenist and Latin American foundation, which found little audibility.
Seven years after the publication of the second edition of El pensamiento indígena y popular en América, in October 1980, the professors of the philosophy department of the University of Buenos Aires organized in the Argentine capital the IIIº Congreso Nacional de Filosofía. The event was presented in continuity with the one organized in 1949 in Mendoza and with the one that had taken place in 1971 in Córdoba. In 1980 the military junta, which had been ruling Argentina since 1976 and had begun to be denounced for systematic and bloody violations of human rights, financed Argentine philosophers to discuss academic topics and to counterbalance the "anti-Argentine campaign". Martín Cremonte analyzes the agenda of the Congress to highlight subtle modes of philosophical collaboration with the image of the dictatorship, with special reference to the Socratism proposed by Francisco Olivieri (1932-2003), then professor of ancient philosophy at the University of Buenos Aires.
From a more complex theoretical-methodological apparatus and a more extensive approach to the problem, Cremonte agrees with Forciniti that the critical bibliography -in his case on the work of Olivieri and the Congress- has been overlooking the philosophical meanings derived from the historical context. Moreover, Cremonte's broad and documented analysis allows us to discover an ethical-political affinity between the inner withdrawal Olivieri calls for from his interpretation of Socratic philosophy and the "prudential reasons" elaborated almost a decade later by the legal philosopher Carlos Nino as the philosophical framework of the Due Obedience Law.
In short, the articles that make up the dossier do not merely confirm that the philosophical theses disseminated in the last decades of the twentieth century in Argentina circulated in close connection with certain political positions. Given the undisputed intertwining between philosophy and politics, both articles resort to diverse approaches from intellectual history to offer us a way of doing philosophical research that recovers not only the conceptual plot but also the historical plot.

Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)