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The paper analyzes the word indio and the concepts underlying it, in American documents from 1494 to 1905 written in Spanish. The paper examines the syntax, the semantics and the contexts in which indio appears, to shed light on the relationships between indio and other actors of the American society, like español, and to shed light on the conceptual changes along 400 years. The paper analyzes various independent syntactic and semantic variables; for instance, the general frequency of the word during four centuries, the textual genre in which indio preferably appears, the quantifi- cation, the individuation, and the semantic classes of verbs. In all variables, it is clear a strong social asymmetry for indio and the low social class status that indio had always in Spanish America. There are some important grammatical and conceptual changes in the 18th century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The concept of "philosophical normalization" has become common place, recently questioned in the narrative of the historical process of philosophy in Latin America. From the theory of layers of time raised by R. Koselleck this paper proposes a critical review of this concept. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I propose analysing the concepts of discovery and conquest, especially the latter, because its use varies in legal documents, which started with the Reyes Católicos, concerning the treatment of Spaniards toward Indians. The crucial point in my analysis will concern the discussion about the nature of the concept of conquest, its relationship with that of just war and the ethics of its application by the participants in the Controversia de Valladolid (1550-51): Bartolomé de las Casas and Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda. The end point of my analysis is 1563, in the reign of Philip II, and the analysis is based on the lexical uses of these concepts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]