 Academic philosophy, or autonomous philosophy as practiced in the West since the Enlightenment, did not begin in Latin America until the first half of the twentieth century. Initially, the reigning philosophical paradigm in the region was Scholasticism. That medieval style of philosophy prevailed during the colonial period, which extended roughly from the early sixteenth century to the early nineteenth century. Mainly confined to rehearsing the doctrines of classical and medieval European philosophers, Latin American Scholasticism was not to be challenged until the eighteenth century, when the theories of the Enlightenment and the rise of modern philosophy began to be known in the American colonies of Spain and Portugal.