“OUR AMERICA” AND THE SCHOOL OF SALAMANCA: 500 YEARS OF PHILOSOPHY AND THEOLOGY
On the occasion of the fifth centenary of the School of Salamanca (1526-2026), and recognizing the importance of this school’s thought in the New World for philosophy and theology, the symposium seeks to create a space for reflection to commemorate the synergies between a school of European thought and “our America.” From a philosophical and theological perspective, it seeks to bring together reflection on: the specificity of the human, the project of society, human rights, interculturality, the old and new scenarios of human transit, the challenges of the present in light of past history, decolonization, and the challenges of AI.
But this reflection seeks to interweave the old and the emerging. It is not merely an exercise in investigating the vestiges of human history, but rather in appropriating and rendering it present through hermeneutic acts. Readings from philosophy and theology are fundamental here. The founder of the School of Salamanca, Francisco de Vitoria, father of international law, is an outstanding author recognized for influencing Bartolomé de las Casas through his thought; for providing the intellectual basis for the debate on the American indigenous peoples in the Valladolid controversy; and for being a precursor of modern political thought. His work is relevant because it reads philosophy and theology from a social, practical, humanist perspective, thereby moving beyond a scholasticism centered on abstract concepts.
This thought was consolidated at the Council of Trent and reached America. It arrived not only through the question of indigenous humanity, but also through pastoral, missionary and moral understandings of the Church. America, for its part, knew how to read and enrich the universal spectrum of philosophy and theology. It enabled new ways of thinking—for example, decentering Aristotelian essentialism and opening it toward a more historicist and dynamic vision.
In every sense, this is a fitting occasion to commemorate and to return to thinking through the old and the emerging on the occasion of the encounter between the School of Salamanca and Our America, 500 years after the school’s founding.
