Philosophy of Liberation

Introduction

Enrique Dussel, an Argentine philosopher, wrote the book in Mexico, where he had gone into exile in 1975 after a bomb attack on his home in Mendoza in 1973; it appeared in 1977. In numbered theses it reads the history of philosophy as the self-justification of a centre, from the Greek polis to the European “I conquer” that, for Dussel, preceded Descartes’ “I think”. Drawing on Levinas’s ethics of the face of the other, he argues that those excluded by the “totality” of the world system – the colonised and the poor, but also women and the young – open a perspective of “exteriority” from which philosophy must begin. Dussel later developed the approach into his Ethics of Liberation (1998).

Connections

Builds on

• Totality and Infinity1961 · Emmanuel Levinas