The Enlightenment in Latin America: Science & Reason On the Colonial Frontier

4 units

What is Enlightenment? Neither the harbinger of a utopian society 'philosophes' and bureaucrats in the Age of Revolutions anticipated nor as totalitarian or destructive as social critics judged from the twentieth century, the projects of self-styled rationalists and empiricists have had repercussions in seemingly every aspect of life. This course invites students to consider the contributions of non-Western actors to the emergence of our modern world. Specifically, we examine the variety of ways scientists, administrators, and laypeople in Latin America and the Caribbean thought about medicine and disease, race, religion, social and political organization, and problems of truth and empiricism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The goal is to engage critically with the view that the modern world emerged from predominantly textual, literate, English, or French traditions and to think about how we can recover the cultural contributions of non-literate groups of indigenous American, African, and Spanish descent.