Leopoldo Zea

Dzieła

• 1969Filozofia amerykańska jako filozofia bez przymiotników

  Odpowiedź Zei Salazarowi Bondy’emu: filozofia, która rozważa własne okoliczności, jest już filozofią, bez przymiotników.

Stanowisko

Following Gaos and Ortega, Zea held that all philosophy arises from reflection on one’s own circumstances. He read Mexican positivism as the ideology of a rising bourgeoisie, and traced how Latin Americans adopted and transformed European ideas. Hegel had placed America outside world history, as a mere land of the future; Zea answered that Latin America’s experience of dependence and marginalisation is itself a place from which universal questions arise. Against Salazar Bondy, who called Latin American philosophy inauthentic, he argued in 1969 that it needs no special justification: it is philosophy “without qualification” (sin más). His work prepared the ground for the philosophy of liberation.

Życie i kontekst

Leopoldo Zea was born in Mexico City in 1912. While working as a telegraph operator he studied philosophy at the National Autonomous University under the Spanish exile José Gaos, a student of Ortega y Gasset. His thesis on Mexican positivism made his name. He taught there for decades, promoted the history of ideas across Latin America and founded a centre for Latin American studies. He died in 2004.

Dalsze główne dzieła

• Positivism in Mexico (El positivismo en México, 1943)
• America as Consciousness (América como conciencia, 1953)
• American Philosophy as Philosophy without Qualification (La filosofía americana como filosofía sin más, 1969)
• Philosophy of American History (Filosofía de la historia americana, 1978)