Andrés de Jesús María y José Bello López
1781-1865 · Latin American · Prominent
Andrés Bello was a Venezuelan-born polymath who built the intellectual institutions of the new Spanish American republics from Santiago, where he founded the University of Chile in 1843 and wrote the Civil Code of 1855. His Filosofía del entendimiento grounds all knowledge in consciousness and sensation, dismisses the ontological questions about space and time as words denoting nothing, and defends a single indivisible self that stays identical through every act it performs. He argued that anyone who knew a person and their circumstances well enough could predict their conduct as surely as a physical event, and that this takes nothing whatever away from feeling free. His 1847 Gramática was written for Americans rather than Spaniards, and treats language as convention, not as a faithful copy of thought.
Signature
The position Bello is most identified with in the Profiler:
- Identity
- strongly leans Unchanging
- Agency
- Compatibilism
Positions on the 11 axes the sources answer
- Natural Processes
- leans Purposeful (88 on a 0–100 scale from Mechanistic to Purposeful)
- Mind
- leans Beyond Brain (88 on a 0–100 scale from Brain Only to Beyond Brain)
- The Divine
- leans Describable (17 on a 0–100 scale from Describable to Indescribable)
- Universals
- leans Nominalism (82 on a 0–100 scale from Realism to Nominalism)
- Identity
- strongly leans Unchanging (4 on a 0–100 scale from Unchanging to Changing)
- Meaning
- leans Inherent (88 on a 0–100 scale from Constructed to Inherent)
- Ground of Being
- leans Transcendence (79 on a 0–100 scale from Immanence to Transcendence)
- Truth
- strongly leans Objective (100 on a 0–100 scale from Subjective to Objective)
- Polity
- mildly leans Illiberalism (33 on a 0–100 scale from Illiberalism to Liberalism)
- War
- mildly between Pacifism and Militarism (50 on a 0–100 scale from Pacifism to Militarism)
- Ignorance
- leans Bondage (17 on a 0–100 scale from Bondage to Bliss)
9 of 20 axes are left blank: the sources do not answer them, or Bello refused the framing. Nothing is imputed; a blank is not a middling score.
Foundational questions
- Theology
- Trinitarian Monotheism
What is your position on the existence and nature of God or gods? - Perception
- Indirect Realism
What do we directly perceive? - Knowledge
- Sense Experience
What is the ultimate foundation of knowledge? - Agency
- Compatibilism
What is the nature of human agency and freedom? - Beginning of Things
- Eternal First Cause
What is the origin of reality? - Time
- Linear Progressive
What is the fundamental shape of time? - Language
- Conventional
What is the fundamental nature of language?