Studies of ideas navigate many routes: conversations, criteria and proposals

Abstract

This essay offers proposals for eidetic studies. It is formulated from a Latin
American perspective and more broadly from a South-South perspective, although
open to those who deal with this disciplinary interweaving anywhere in the world. Its
objectives are: 1) to explain a brief bibliographic review about lines of work on studies
of ideas and interconnected topics at the beginning of the XXI century; 2) to question
the studies of the really existing ideas, suggesting some routes to develop them better,
and 3) to contribute to constitute a more interesting disciplinary field for those who
operate there, as for the rest of academia and society in general. The twelve routes
suggested here can be better traveled by assuming a pluralist and progressive position
in epistemic terms: pluralist, in the sense that it aspires more to the breadth of the conversations than to the constitution of exclusive chapels; progressive, as democratic,
privileging the diversity of ideas, and emancipatory, advocating the intellectual
independence of intellectual ecosystems, as opposed to another conservative one,
either as elitist and / or conformist and / or strictly disciplinarist and / or attached to
the agendas of the intellectual ecosystems of the center. Twelve routes, by pluralistic
and emancipatory, arranged towards the planetary.