The Debates on Existentialism in the First National Congress of Philosophy (1949) and their Incidence in the Field of Argentine Psychology

Abstract

This paper focuses on one of the discussion developed in the First National Congress of Philosophy. The debate that will be the subject of our attention is the one that appears in the plenary sessions called "Existentialism". It is precisely there that as we believe, a different shade of the fundamental conflict between Catholicism (predominantly scholastic) versus Existentialism that follows the Congress, is manifested, and by which they face, on the one hand, the atheistic Existentialism that proclaims the radical incompatibility between Christian theism and Philosophy predominantly represented by Heidegger, and, on the other, Catholic thought not fully identified with Scholasticism and closer to existentialist approaches, which support a dialogue of deep reconciliation between them. Finally, to visualize the possible incidence in Argentina Psychology, these debates are put in dialogue with those developed five years later in another event of great importance for the history of thought in our country particularly for Psychology: the First Argentine Congress of Psychology