La teoría de los climas y su alcance en la antropología roussoniana

Abstract

This article searches the role of the climate theory in Rousseau´s anthropology, especially in relation to the beginning of society and language and also about differences between South and North. Montesquieu and Buffon are the most famous theoreticians, but we must remember also some previous writers, as such Du Bos, Lamy or Duclos that used this theory to explain the aesthetics taste or the language. This theory adopts a natural approach to the customs and temperament of countries, but is not free of moral prejudices. On the one hand, Rousseau uses this theory to resolve the problem of the passage from de nature state to the civil state but, on the other hand, this theory becomes in Rousseau´s philosophy a criticism of ethnocentric prejudices proposing a new view about cultures.