 An early proposal to develop a peculiar Latin American philosophy is that of the Argentine Juan Bautista Alberdi (1810–1884) in his “Ideas….” This short newspaper article, published in Montevideo in 1840, offers advice about how to develop a high school course in philosophy to be taught at the Colegio de Humanidades (School of Humanities). It recommends that the course be aimed at “instruct[ing] the youth in the principles that reside in the conscience of our societies” (1840, p. 97, my translation). On this view, Latin American philosophy should be devoted, not to abstract metaphysics, but rather to applied philosophy, focusing on the social and political issues of the day in the newly independent nations of the region. But Alberdi’s article also ventures into metaphilosophical issues that were far beyond politics and diplomacy, his areas of expertise—notoriously opining, among other things, that it was for Europe, not Latin America, to do the theoretical philosophical thinking (1840, p. 95). Not to be reprinted until the following century, this article is unlikely to have had the influence ascribed to it by some distinctivists of the 1940s and their followers. The point is made forcefully by the Uruguayan Arturo Ardao (1912–2003), a well-known historian of Latin American philosophy who contends that the article “came to have influence in Latin America in the context of the philosophical innovations of the 1940s, precisely a year after its centennial. Its most decisive apologist turned out to be the magisterial philosopher Gaos in Mexico ” (1991, p. xxiii, my translation). Arturo Roig also regards the twentieth-century fascination with Alberdi’s “Ideas” as an ideological coincidence. He writes: