by OSCAR GUARDIOLA-RIVERA
The British magazine Prospect recently compiled its list of the world’s most influential thinkers. Notably, three of the top five are from India, one is from China and the fifth from Latin America.
It’s official. The world’s intellectual center has moved from Europe and the United States to what we used to call the “Third World.”
The history of this denomination was never clear. In my book Si Latinoamérica gobernase el mundo (If Latin America Governed the World), I suggested that the three-part division of the world during the Cold War era was really a belated, imperial and Christian version of the ancient, Aristotelian distinction between Asia, Europe and Greece.
Aristotle would have been inspired by the Platonic explanation of the relationship between soul and body, which ties the ability to think, and to do so constantly, to climate and the region in which one lives. In this ancient psycho-geography, excessively cold or hot climates prevented their inhabitants from using reason, and made them more erratic and less efficient.
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A new way of thinking?
But the Prospect list may be a modest symptom of a fairly significant event: the beginning of the end of a picture of the world that has been dominant for some 2,000 years, and without which religion, gepolitics, the economy, international law and the global divisions in modern science and philosophy would be inexplicable.
World Crunch and El Espectador for more