The philosophy of history of José Enrique Rodó and the Models of Civilization of Western World

Abstract

In this article, we propose to examine the philosophy of history of the Uruguayan intellectual José Enrique Rodó from two constitutive identifying traces of his work, namely: a) the rodonians appropriations of the characters of W. Shakespeare’s The Tempest (1611-1613), especially in his most famous work Ariel, in order to build a sense, in his present – the turn of the nineteenth to the twentieth century – of the past and the future of America, specially of Latin America; b) the cultural models that shaped the rodonian narrative in what would be a philosophy of Latin American history and some historical subjects of that change.