Alonso de la Vera Cruz’s Take on the Conceivability of Prime Matter

The volume reconstructs central tenets of the early modern Scholastic debate that took place in colonial Latin America between the 16th and the 18th centuries. This period coincided with the foundation of American Scholasticism (or “colonial” Scholasticism). On the one hand, the establishment of higher education institutions, first in New Spain and, later, in other administrative regions, seeded a fertile framework that nurtured a new generation of Scholastic philosophers. On the other, the necessity to convert local communities to Christianity (and politically subjugate them) led to the proliferation of training centres and missions where learned Jesuit, Franciscan, and Dominican thinkers tackled the new cultural and natural settings they were experiencing. This twofold process facilitated the inauguration of a long-lasting, albeit often neglected, philosophical tradition in colonial Latin America: a tradition that was structurally bound to European Scholasticism yet also divergent from many of the traditional tropes that characterised its transatlantic developments.