Philosophy of liberation

The philosophy of liberation is a Latin American movement that thinks from the standpoint of the poor and the colonised and aims at their liberation.

It emerged in Argentina in the early 1970s, alongside liberation theology and dependency theory, with Enrique Dussel as its leading figure. It criticises the claim of European thought to speak for everyone and argues that philosophy should begin from those it has excluded. Paulo Freire's pedagogy of the oppressed, developed in Brazil and, in exile, in Chile in the 1960s, is closely related, and the debate between Augusto Salazar Bondy and Leopoldo Zea over whether a Latin American philosophy exists forms part of its background. On this site it answers questions on education (6.3) and culture.