English

Abstract

This essay proposes a genealogy of the birth of modern political philosophy that highlights the relevance of the American continents and the Caribbean in the definition of modernity. Modernity is taken here as a cultural phenomenon that unfolds with the opening of the Atlantic commercial route for Europe in the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The philosophical debates about alterity, difference, conquest, law, and civilization that occurred at the time in relation to the historical events in the so-called "New World" represented a departure from so-called medieval premises as they were tied to modern expressions of selfhood. The works of Bartolomé de las Casas, Francisco de Vitoria, and Francisco Suárez offer three different conceptions of law and the legitimacy of political institutions in modernity. They influenced in different ways posterior religious and secular conceptions of self and political world in Europe and the Americas.