Samuel Ramos: Toward a philosophical anthropology

Abstract

The article explores Samuel Ramos’s philosophical thought on philosophical anthropology, emphasizing his conception of the human being as a structured totality composed of three ontological levels: vitality, soul, and spirit. The study’s main objective is to demonstrate that Ramos’s philosophy represents a systematic program to understand human existence from ontological, axiological, and cultural perspectives, bridging European philosophical traditions—especially those of Scheler and Ortega y Gasset—with the Mexican intellectual context of the twentieth century. The methodology follows an analytic, interpretive, and hermeneutical approach, grounded in a critical reading of Ramos’s major works (Toward a New Humanism, Profile of Man and Mexican Culture) and their comparison with classical and contemporary sources in philosophical anthropology. Nava Preciado reconstructs Ramos’s tripartite model of the human being, arguing that the spirit, conceived as evaluative and free consciousness, is central to his anthropological vision. The scope of the research lies in reaffirming the relevance of Ramos’s work as a foundation for a Mexican philosophy of the human, where culture emerges as the sphere through which humankind fulfills its spiritual and universal values. The author concludes that the moral and cultural advancement of Mexican identity depends on the integration of vitality, emotion, and spirit into a creative unity.