Liberation Philosophy

Liberation philosophy (filosofia de la liberacion) is a current of Latin American philosophy that emerged in Argentina in the early 1970s, developed chiefly by Enrique Dussel together with figures including Rodolfo Kusch and Juan Carlos Scannone, which argues that mainstream Western philosophy, including its own Marxist and existentialist currents, remains structured by a Eurocentric standpoint that treats the colonized, impoverished and marginalized "other" as an object of analysis rather than as a source of philosophical insight in its own right. Drawing on Emmanuel Levinas's ethics of the Other together with dependency theory's account of how Latin America's economic underdevelopment is produced by its structural relation to wealthier nations, Dussel argued that authentic philosophy must begin from the concrete situation and ethical demand of the oppressed (el pueblo, "the people") rather than from supposedly neutral, universal first principles that in practice reflect the perspective of the powerful. The movement developed in close dialogue with, and lent philosophical grounding to, Latin American liberation theology, sharing its preferential option for the poor while working out a more systematically philosophical account of ethics, history and political liberation rather than a primarily theological one. Forced into exile from Argentina by political repression in 1975, Dussel continued to develop and internationalize liberation philosophy from Mexico, and it remains an influential current within Latin American and postcolonial philosophy, in ongoing dialogue with decolonial theory more broadly.