 Some philosophers stretched the concept of philosophy to combine historical, philosophical, and literary analysis to both Mexican and universal themes. For instance, in his essay “Del arte o de la monstruosidad” (1940), the distinguished historian and philosopher Edmundo O’Gorman maintained that the study of Pre-Columbian art should be based on different categories from those used to evaluate European art. In Crisis y porvenir de la ciencia histórica (1947), he criticized positivist historiography from the point of view of historicism and existentialism, and set the theoretical foundations for his subsequent notion of “the invention of America”. Likewise, while Alfonso Reyes (1889–1959) and Octavio Paz (1914–1998) were not professional philosophers, they authored texts that should not be excluded from a history of Mexican philosophy. In El deslinde (1944), Reyes offered a theory of literature using tools of phenomenology and in El arco y la lira (1956), Paz wrote a literary theory that used elements from existentialism and structuralism.