This anthology shows the fundamental thesis of the Philosophy of Liberation as a way of thinking that arises from a locus enuntiationis (place of enunciation) located externally, in the geopolitical, cultural, economic, political, military periphery of the global South, with an active position in living in a dependent, neo-colonial world. As an act of decolonizing rebellion, the Philosophy of Liberation saw in the dominated peoples, excluded from modern civilization —and, therefore, from its thought—, the opportunity to deploy a broader horizon than that of mere Eurocentrism.
Starting from world history, Dussel situates philosophical thinking from the alterity of the Other, the nothing, the non-being, "the widow, the orphan, the foreigner" (as Hammurabi describes them in his code of Babylonian law) and the poor, otherness from which the criticism of any system (economic, political, epistemological, philosophical, gender, cultural, racial, etc.) that closes in on itself can be made.
Dussel is inspired by his favorite authors (Latin American and European, from Salazar Bondy or Freire to Sartre or Heidegger, passing through Hinkelammert, Levinas, Zea, Ricoeur or Benjamin) and subsumes them in a new decolonizing and critical discourse. The result is not only a new vision of world history, but new philosophical categories that are refined, specifying, as the debates go by, over the years, the existential places from which one thinks. The intercultural interpellation of the native peoples is strengthening the original theses of the Philosophy of Liberation.
This work is dedicated in memory of Dr. Juan José Bautista (+2021), who left us too soon, and his wife, Dr. Katya Colmenares, who prepared this anthology and wrote his introduction.