This translation of Enrique Dussel's “‘Ser-Hispano’: Un Mundo en el ‘Border’ de Muchos Mundos” offers an interpretation of hispanos (Latin Americans and U.S. latinos) as historically, culturally, and geographically located “in-between” many worlds that combine to constitute an identity on the intercultural “border.” To illustrate how hispanos have navigated and continue to navigate their complex history in order to create a polyphonic identity, the essay sketches five historical-cultural “worlds” that come together to form the hispanic “world.”.

For centuries, several disciplines have tried to tackle the topic of how legitimate it is to use violence in order to solve social problems. One of the most recent interdisciplinary approaches (and one of the most successful in present-day Latin America) is the so-called “Ethics of Liberation,” designed by Enrique Dussel. Based on the Theology of Liberation, this theory goes beyond the limits of theology as a discipline and pleads for three ethical criteria that every political revolution must fulfill (...) to use violence in a legitimate way. The first is a formal criterion, which basically takes after the ideal dialogue situation endorsed by Karl-Otto Apel and Jürgen Habermas, and purports to be rooted in yet another discipline, linguistics. The second is a material criterion, defined as the upshot of an acceptable welfare for all citizens, thus intimately linked with the discipline of economy and political philosophy. The third is a criterion of feasibility, which makes a revolt legitimate if, and only if, it has a reasonable possibility of succeeding; hence strategic issues take a leading role. This essay contends that each of these criteria is conceptually incompatible with violence. Hence, Dussel’s arguments involve multiple contradictions as he aims to justify the use of violence precisely with these interdisciplinary criteria. (shrink)

For centuries, various disciplines have tried to tackle the topic of how legitimate it is to use violence in order to solve social problems. One of the most recent interdisciplinary approaches, most successful in present-day Latin America, is the so-called "Ethics of Liberation," designed by Enrique Dussel. Based on the Theology of Liberation, this theory goes beyond the limits of theology as a discipline and pleads for three ethical criteria that every political revolution must fulfill to use violence in (...) a legitimate way. The first is a formal criterion, which basically takes after the ideal dialogue situation endorsed by Karl-Otto Apel and Jürgen Habermas, and purports to be rooted in yet another discipline, linguistics. The second is a material criterion, defined as the upshot of an acceptable welfare for all citizens, thus intimately linked with the discipline of economics and political philosophy. The third is a criterion of feasibility, which makes a revolt legitimate if, and only if, it has a reasonable possibility of succeeding; hence strategic issues take a leading role. This essay contends that each of these criteria is conceptually incompatible with violence. Hence, Dussel's arguments involve multiple contradictions as he aims to justify the use of violence precisely with these interdisciplinary criteria. (shrink)

Enrique Dussel and John Dewey share commitments to philosophical theory and practice aimed at addressing human problems, democratic modes of inquiry, and progressive social reform, but also maintain productive differences in their fundamental starting point for political philosophy and their use of the social sciences. Dussel provides a corrective to Dewey’s Eurocentrism and to his tendency to underplay the challenges of incorporating marginalized populations by insisting that social and political philosophy begin from the perspective of the marginalized and (...) excluded. Simultaneously, Dewey encourages a modest experimental and fallibilist approach to social transformation that promises more feasible social reforms than Dussel’s approach rooted in phenomenology and the critical social sciences. (shrink)

In this brief philosophical exposé, I will narrate the events as well as my personal and ecospiritual reflections pertaining to the COVID-19 pandemic which began in Wuhan, China sometime in November 2019 and have spread sporadically across countries and continents wreaking havoc medically, politically, and individually, as it claimed more than three hundred thousand lives and had virally infected more than four million of the global population. This phenomenon had led us to confront inevitable eschatological questions: Is this a sign (...) of the end times? Will this efface the vulnerable human race? Will this disrupt the global economy as capitalism had collapsed worldwide? Do these events signal a new political era, perhaps the dawn of socialism and communism, as countries worldwide are led to confront its own deficiencies and inadequacies? Which social and political systems and worldviews are efficient particularly in this age of globalization? What are our chances for human survival? These apocalyptic questions had led me to my reflections on Enrique Dussel’s philosophy of liberation, particularly on his concept of Christian ethics and the moral theology of liberation. In so doing, the paper incorporates a holistic outlook on the pandemic trying to look at the bigger picture in a global scale and considers an all-inclusive interpretation on the pandemic that ranges from the environmental, civic, cultural, political, and socioeconomic concerns. I shall try to sew and patch the pieces together into a much wider, integrated, and comprehensive outlook that includes both the global and the peripheral human experiences. (shrink)

The Ethics of Liberation by Enrique Dussel pleads for three criteria that every political revolution must fulfill if it wishes to use violence in a legitimate way: the formal criterion (that basically takes after the ideal dialogue situation endorsed by Apel and Habermas); the material criteri..

El presente artículo trata la presentación que Henry Corbin hace del sufismo de Ibn ' Arabī. Pretende mostrar cómo el proyecto filosófico del pensador francés (atravesado de protestantismo, heideggerianismo y fenomenología) produce una obturación de la doctrina akbarí, que denota cierta falta de amor o desinterésen la alteridad en tanto alteridad. El itinerario constará de cinco pasos. Primero, nos acercaremos a los años de formación de Corbin. Segundo, presentaremo salgunos puntos esenciales de su obra más célebre, La imaginación creadora en (...) el sufismo de Ibn ‘Arabî. Tercero, se mostrarán aquellos aspectos de la doctrinade Ibn ' Arabī allí obturados. Cuarto, expondremos algunas conclusiones a partir de estas ausencias. Quinto, a modo de epílogo, y ya en el ámbito de la filosofía latinoamericana, ofreceremos una mirada al proyecto de la transmodernidad de Enrique Dussel, desde el paradigma del amor akbarí. (shrink)

This paper proposes an application of Enrique Dussel’s ethics of liberation to an issue of crucial importance to US minorities: the debate on affirmative action. Over the past fifty years, this debate has been framed in terms of the opposition between advocates of affirmative action who claim that it is needed in order to achieve the integration and participation of traditionally oppressed groups to society without which there is no equality of rights, and critics who argue that affirmative action (...) violates equality by enforcing a double standard that undermines the ideal of a color-blind society. In this paper, I show how the basic principles of Dussel’s ethical theory (which are best expounded in his book Ethics of Liberation) allow us to address what I take to be the main demands of both advocates and critics of affirmative action in a satisfactory way. (shrink)

Drawing on the work of Enrique Dussel, Linda Tuhiwai Smith, and other scholars of colonialism, this essay traces colonialist legacies in the popular global-ethics literature. I argue that colonialist elements implicit in prominent global-ethics anthologies can foster attitudes of superiority over and aloofness toward economically struggling communities, even when the texts argue for aid to “the global poor.” Finally, I offer suggestions for how those of us who study and teach global ethics in the affluent world might begin to (...) unsettle colonialist baggage and cultivate skills more conducive to democratic global communities. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Affect Attunement in the Caregiver-Infant Relationship and Across SpeciesExpanding the Ethical Scope of ErosCynthia WillettCompelling glimpses into the ethical capacities of our animal kin reveal new possibilities for ethical relationships encompassing humans with other animal species. Consider the remarkable report of a female bonobo in a British zoo who assists a bird found in her cage by retrieving the fallen bird, and spreading its wings so that this fellow (...) creature might fly away to its freedom. Or the report of a cat in a nursing home who curls up around dying elderly patients, and remains steadily by their side as they, unbeknownst to the medical personnel, pass away.1 Or of a sacred moment of silence by a stream for baboons in East Africa.2 Or of the ethics that spontaneously emerges among wolves at play.3 On the basis of extensive studies, biologist Frans de Waal argues that such anecdotes are far from rare, and that some core elements of moral understanding and compassion occur among a significant range of nonhuman as well as the human animal species. Apes, monkeys, and perhaps all nonhuman animals fail to display a distinctly human capacity for abstract moral reasoning. As de Waal (2006) remarks, it is difficult to tell (173–75). But our furry and feathery kin do without a doubt demonstrate rich elements of ethical response, and they often enough extend their moral concern to creatures beyond their own species. Of course, they will also bite each other’s heads off or eat their own young as well. But this is just to say that animals are neither natural [End Page 111] innocents nor savage brutes. Like us, they belong to what post-Nietzschean philosophers might frame, somewhat ironically, as a postlapsarian world of good and evil.What kind of philosophical approach could account for these postlapsarian genealogies of ethics? Biologists, primatologists, and anthropologists are drawing upon investigations of prosocial behavior to remap the boundaries of ethics, as for example in Isabelle Stengers’s call for cosmopolitical ecologies of relationships (2010, 33). Such a cosmopolitics aims to encompass our kin and kind from diverse species within the ethical boundaries of common worlds. Donna Haraway discovers an opening for Stengers’s ecology of relationships in the intimate encounters among co-evolving species, especially those she calls companion species (2008, 83). She argues, following Derrida, that the abstract reasoning processes of Stoic and Kantian cosmopolitan ethics remain closed to the participation of nonhuman animals as anything more than dependents, failing to observe the ways in which they act as companions, if not moral subjects. But then, what normative force might bind together an ethically attuned biosocial sphere that we as humans co-inhabit with other animal species?To explore this question, this essay takes its cues from well-established research on the responsive, preverbal connection of the human infant and adult caregiver (Bateson 1979; Trevarthen 1984; Stern 1985, 2010; Gibbs 2001, 2010; Hansen 2004; Anderson 2006; Papoulias and Callard 2010; Willett 1995, 2001). To this research we can add new animal studies (Smuts 1999, 2001; Fudge 2002; de Waal 2006, 2009; Bekoff 2007; Molnar 2008; Haraway 2008). These animal studies provide a basis for extending an “ethics of eros” with roots in Luce Irigaray, Michel Foucault, Enrique Dussel, Africana feminism, Freudo-Marxist critical theory, and Plato (for discussions of this tradition, see Bergoffen 1997; Huffer 2009; Willett 2001)—but reconfigured in terms of social bonds across multiple animal species. In this tradition of ethics, the lack of a cognitive-based moral subjectivity that can translate into human terms does not consign nonhuman species to a mute moral status. On the contrary, some more primordial basis for relationship and meaning may weave thin but substantial threads of a postmoral ethics across regions of the biosphere.Given the diverse modes of subjectivity among animal species, and even the lack of what we call a moral subject altogether in many species, neither ordinary modes of empathy nor of moral understanding go very far in forging multispecies social bonds. For this reason, we turn to research on “the attunement of affects” in the infant-caregiver relationship (Stern 1985). As we shall see, this... (shrink)

El presente artículo pretende mirar a Latinoamérica desde la perspectiva de la ontología. Y como hay algo que no acaba de encajar, busca en el inexplorado terreno de la meontología y el no-ser a partir de dos pensadores políticos latinoamericanos recientes, Dussel y Laclau. Por un lado, la Filosofía de la Liberación asocia el centro con la ontología y el ser, así como la periferia con lo Otro y el no-ser. De esto se desprende que, aun y asumiendo el (...) heideggeriano “olvido del ser”, la ontología helenocéntrica se basa en la negación aún más originaria y fundamental de la nada. A continuación, se intenta demostrar cómo esta renegación ha ido de la mano de la exclusión de lo bárbaro, lo popular y lo femenino, principalmente. Tras un breve ex cursus sobre Schmitt en tanto que la forma más acabada de horror vacui dentro de la ontología política europea, el artículo concluye con un análisis pormenorizado de la reconceptualización del vacío en la obra de Laclau, que puede permitir una mejor comprensión del populismo en general, y de su vertiente latinoamericana en particular. (shrink)

Filsafat bukanlah seperti yang selama ini dipahami dan dimengerti. Ia bukanlah satu disiplin berpikir, apalagi asketisme bernalar, yang kedap-politis. Nyatanya, filsafat lahir dari silang-sengkarut politis antar-filsafat dalam momen dan ruang historis yang terus berubah. Filsafat sang pemenang (philosophy of the dominator) akan mengangkangi dan menjajah filsafat sang kalah (philosophy of the dominated). Kajian politis atas filsafat-filsafat dunia masih terbilang jarang, untuk tidak mengatakan belum pernah ada. Termasuk kajian yang jarang tersebut adalah kajian yang ditulis Enrique Dussel (lahir 1934). Dalam (...) buku The Philosophy of Liberation (2003), Dussel memperkenalkan kajian Politik Filsafat-kajian tentang tangan-tangan penjajah yang bermain di dalam proses produksi suatu tradisi filosofis. Fokus utama kajiannya memang Filsafat Barat Modern (the Modern Western Philosophy); meskipun demikian, pendekatan yang digunakan dalam bukunya itu ternyata dapat pula diterapkan pada gejala dan fenomena filosofis di negeri-negeri lain, hatta fenomena filosofis yang terjadi di negeri kita sendiri. Makalah ini bermaksud menyingkap penjajahan politis yang dilakukan Filsafat Barat Modern (the Modern Philosophy) terhadap tradisi filsafat sejagad, penjajahan politis yang dijalankan Filsafat Barat Modern terhadap Filsafat Asia Tenggara (the Southeast Asian Philosophy), serta penjajahan politis yang dijalankan Negara terhadap tradisi Filsafat Indonesia, berpijak pada kajian Philosophy of Liberation yang ditulis oleh Enrique Dussel tersebut. (shrink)

In this article, I broadly sketch out the current philosophical debate over immigration and highlight some of its shortcomings. My contention is that the debate has been too focused on border enforcement and therefore has left untouched one of the more central issue of this debate: what to do with unauthorized immigrants who have already crossed the border and with the “push and pull” factors that have created this situation. After making this point, I turn to the work of Enrique (...) Dussel and argue that his philosophical approach offers some insights that can help overcome these shortcomings. In particular, Dussel’s commitment to a social critique and transformation that begins with the material grievances of the most excluded and oppressed in a community. Under this type of approach, the immigration debate would begin with the grievances of the victims of immigration polices and reform (i.e. unauthorized immigrants) instead of with concerns for how to better enforce borders. Lastly, I point out that this type of approach is consistent with the current Immigrant Rights Movement in the United States. (shrink)

In response to those calling for philosophical dialogue across the Americas, this paper considers the historical emergence of the concept of el pueblo (“the people”) as the subject and object of democracy. The first section makes a linguistic claim: the genuinely communal nature of “the people” clearly appears when considering el pueblo because it is unambiguously singular, grammatically speaking. The second section makes a historical claim: the microhistory of a largely indigenous pueblo in Mexico’s Yucatán enables us to begin unpacking (...) the complex concrete, historical, and genealogical dimensions of el pueblo. The brief concluding section suggests that historically contextualizing and concretizing el pueblo provides conceptual support for some of the premises that underwrite Latin American philosophies of liberation, including that of Enrique Dussel. -/- . (shrink)

My essay begins by providing a broad vision of how William James’s psychology and philosophy were a two-pronged attempt to revive the self whose foundations had collapsed after the Civil War. Next, I explain how this revival was all too successful insofar as James inadvertently resurrected the imperial self, so that he was forced to adjust and develop his philosophy of religion in keeping with his anti-imperialism. James’s mature philosophy of religion therefore articulates a vision of the radically ethical saint (...) religiously bound to a decidedly pluralistic universe. I evaluate James’s philosophy of religion by comparing it to Enrique Dussel’s psychological portrait of the imperialist ego, Dussel’s attempt to religiously bind this ego, and the more radical philosophy that results. I suggest that Dussel’s philosophy of liberation: 1) better theorizes the religious contraction of the self as a necessary part of ethical and political life and 2) offers a more concrete and radically democratic philosophy. My overarching aim is to show how Dussel’s liberation philosophy can help critically develop James’s pragmatist claim that religion might provide a force for widely and positively transforming our ethical and political lives. (shrink)

This essay suggests that the U.S.-American Pragmatist tradition could be fruitfully reconstructed by way of a dialogue with Latin American Liberation Philosophy. More specifically, I work to establish a common ground for future comparative work by: 1) gathering and interpreting Enrique Dussel’s scattered comments on Pragmatism, 2) showing how the concept of liberation already functions in John Dewey’s Pragmatism, and 3) suggesting reasons for further developing this inter-American philosophical dialogue and debate.

Este artículo de reflexión problematiza la didáctica de las lenguas extranjeras desde una inquietud filosófica-intercultural para contextos mayoritaria e históricamente monolingües como el latinoamericano. Inicialmente, se describen los rasgos de colonialidad latentes en el enfoque que el Marco Común Europeo de Referencia asume para tratar la interculturalidad. Seguidamente, se realiza un análisis crítico-filosófico de los desafíos que la interculturalidad enfrenta en América Latina en el contexto anteriormente mencionado, y se revisan las relaciones que existen entre interculturalidad y glotopolítica, asumiendo que (...) el latinoamericanismo de Mendieta, la resemantización del orientalismo de Said, el mimetismo y la hibridación bhabhiana, así como la filosofía intercultural, son quizá los desafíos filosóficos más grandes. Finalmente, se presenta un exordio para una interculturalidad crítica en lenguas-culturas extranjeras, en el que se tienen en cuenta algunas contribuciones del Grupo Modernidad/Colonialidad, concretamente de Dussel, Walsh, Castro-Gómez y Fornet-Betancourt, reconociendo que la didáctización de la interculturalidad en las licenciaturas de lenguas modernas de Colombia está por construirse. (shrink)