ABSTRACT
This chapter explores some aspects of that conflict with an eye to determining whether the indigenous peoples had reached an understanding of the natural world that could stand comparison with Western conceptions grounded in philosophy and science. The native peoples of Latin America have left abundant evidence of their interest in the question of the origins of the natural world. The Mayans were not the only native group of Latin America to leave a fully developed folk cosmology. The chapter briefly examines some Western folk cosmologies often taken as the precursors of science and philosophy. Rational argumentation is perhaps what Jose Vasconcelos had in mind when he conceived the notion of a "super-criterion" as the method of philosophy. The chapter argues that the pre-Socratic Greek thinkers could be considered only primitive philosophers, with their doctrines at most counting as the precursors of mature theories of the origins of the universe.
