 The principal purely descriptive question in those debates concerns whether philosophy exists as a practice or discipline in Latin America. When answered in the affirmative, a related question is when did it begin? There is consensus that the practice of philosophy sin más (as such—i.e., for its own sake, autonomous of non-philosophical interests) is an early twentieth-century phenomenon. But, understood in a broader sense, it dates from the colonial period. Thus, some take Latin American philosophy to be a contemporary phenomenon (e.g., Miró Quesada 1974, p. 75), while others trace it back to the sixteenth century (e.g., Gracia et al. 1995, p. 462; Hurtado 2007, p. 47). The disagreement, however, is only apparent, since as noted by Francisco Romero one can acknowledge the colonial origins of (broad) philosophy while noting “the prevalence [then] of pedagogical over philosophical concerns with regard to creativity and even the re-thinking of one’s ideas and doctrines” (1941, p. 12, see also his 1943, p. 127).