Samuel Ramos Quotes on Knowledge
Samuel Ramos (1897–1959), the principal Mexican philosopher of the generation between Vasconcelos and Leopoldo Zea, gave twentieth-century Mexican thought its first systematic philosophical study of the Mexican character in the Profile of Man and Culture in Mexico (1934). The framework draws on the philosophical anthropology of Ortega y Gasset and on the depth psychology of Adler to argue that Mexican intellectual and cultural production has been distorted by an inferiority complex inherited from the colonial encounter, with the consequent prescription that authentic Mexican philosophical knowledge must arise from the patient self-examination of the actual Mexican condition rather than from the imported intellectual systems of the metropolitan tradition.
Quotes
-
Attributed to Samuel Ramos:
“A people that knows itself can begin to free itself.”
-
Attributed to Samuel Ramos:
“Imitation of foreign culture without self-knowledge is sterile.”
-
Attributed to Samuel Ramos:
“Education must form persons, not merely instruct minds.”
-
Attributed to Samuel Ramos:
“The task of philosophy in Mexico is the recovery of the Mexican.”
-
“The more of a student he is—and no one can be a historian without being a very devoted student—the more he is removed from that intimate contact with men of all classes and of all modes of thought, from which the statesman derives by far the greater part of that knowledge of mankind which enables him to give useful play to his imaginative power for their benefit.”
p. viii -
“Freeman and Macaulay are alike in the high value they set upon parliamentary institutions. On the other hand, when Macaulay wants to make you understand a thing, he compares it with that which existed in his own day. The standard of the present is always with him. Freeman traces it to its origin, and testifies to its growth. The strength of this mode of proceeding in an historian is obvious. Its w”
Letter to James Bryce , quoted in James Bryce, Studies in Contemporary Biography (1903), p. 274