School · 18 thinkers
Latin American & Caribbean Philosophy
18 thinkers of Latin American & Caribbean Philosophy on the Agora star map, from Bartolomé de las Casas to Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, in chronological order.
- 1484–1566Bartolomé de las Casas
For Las Casas, the conquest was a crime against the Indigenous peoples of America, who are fully human with the same rights as anyone.
- 1539–1616Inca Garcilaso de la Vega
The Spanish misunderstood the Incas because they misunderstood their language; told from Quechua memory, Inca rule appears as an ordered civilisation that prepared the way for Christianity.
- c. 1648–1695Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz
Women have the same right to study and knowledge as men, and the soul’s hunger for understanding is natural even where it hits its limits.
- 1853–1895José Martí
Latin Americans should understand and govern themselves from their own reality instead of copying European or North American models.
- 1882–1959José Vasconcelos
For Vasconcelos, beauty and feeling, not cold science, unite the world, and he hoped the mixing of all peoples would create a new universal humanity – a vision criticised for still ranking “races”.
- 1894–1930José Carlos Mariátegui
The oppression of Indigenous Peruvians is about land, and socialism in Latin America must grow from Andean communal traditions, not copy Europe.
- 1900–1969José Gaos
Philosophy cannot escape its history or the person who practises it; every system is in part a confession, and so the thought of Spain and Spanish America, grown from its own circumstances, deserves study as philosophy in its own right.
- 1912–2004Leopoldo Zea
Latin American thinking about its own situation is real philosophy, not a lesser copy – against a view of history that left America out.
- 1921–1997Paulo Freire
Education should not pour facts into passive students but help the oppressed, through dialogue, to understand and change their world.
- 1922–1979Rodolfo Kusch
Beneath the European surface of Latin America lives an older, indigenous and popular way of being, rooted in the land, which the cities despise but cannot do without.
- 1925–1974Augusto Salazar Bondy
A dominated culture can only produce imitative philosophy – authentic thought in Latin America requires liberation first.
- 1928–2024Gustavo Gutiérrez
God takes the side of the poor, so theology must start from the struggle for their liberation, not from abstract doctrine.
- 1928–2018Aníbal Quijano
The racial hierarchy created by the conquest of America still organises work, knowledge and power across the modern world.
- 1934–2023Enrique Dussel
Modernity began in 1492 by denying the humanity of others, so ethics must start from the victims and their excluded perspective.
- b. 1941Walter Mignolo
Modernity and colonialism are two sides of one coin, and real knowledge can come from thinking at the borders that colonialism drew.
- 1942–2004Gloria Anzaldúa
Living between cultures, languages and identities creates a new consciousness that can hold contradictions together instead of choosing sides.
- 1944–2020María Lugones
Colonialism imposed a strict two-gender system on many peoples who had organised gender differently, so feminism must also be decolonial.
- b. 1949Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui
Indigenous and European worlds coexist in Bolivia without blending into one, and decolonisation has to be lived in practice, not just written about in universities abroad.