Philosophy of liberation

How do we critically engage South African constitutionalism today? This is the basic question that will animate this article. In order to investigate this, I will specifically look at the Constitution of the Republic of South Africa, Act 108 of 1996 (the Constitution) from the perspective of an ethics of liberation. This investigation will proceed by way of two main points of discussion, namely an exposition of Enrique Dussel's formulation of an ethics of liberation and an application of this ethics of liberation related to the Constitution as critique. The three fundamental principles -material, formal, feasible -of an ethics of liberation will be discussed and applied, in the form of three questions, to the current constitutional order. These questions will then be discussed and answered in order to show how the Constitution came into being due to a process of unethical feasibility.

This work analyzes the influence of Marxism in two theological projects of liberation: Liberation theology. Perspectives (1971) by Gustavo Gutiérrez and The ideological weapons of death (1977) by Franz Hinkelammert. The work is divided into three sections. The first two sections are intended to analyze, respectively, the texts of Gutiérrez and Hinkelammert. Emphasis is placed here on the reception and particular appropriation of Marxism made by each author. The third section, finally, compares the peculiar readings of Marxism of these two authors as well as their theological projects

Latin America is experiencing a new era of the myth of development based on a model of extractivism. The most dramatic face of extractivism in the region has been, on the one hand, the growing presence of transnational mining corporations supported by national governments as well as regional and international finance and development institutions, and, on the other hand, the intense resistance against this development by social movements. In this paper we present the case of Andalgalá (a small town in the Province of Catamarca in Argentina) and the people’s struggle
against transnational mining corporations and their allies. Following the tradition of the Philosophy of Liberation and Dussel’s ana-dialectic method, we have closely engaged with, what have been called, the “Argentinean communities of NO”, expressing their opposition to neocolonial forms of development and management. In this paper we are specifically interested in understanding how the two main managerial devices used by mining companies, corporate social responsibility (CSR) and governance pacts, impacted the people’s struggle. Overall, this paper provides a snapshot of the battles at the frontlines of extractivism. It hopes to give voice to those people who are normally not heard, providing a space for their views of a different kind of development.

Enrique Dussel’s Ethics of Liberation in the Age of Globalization and Exclusion brings together the diversity of traditions and problems on which he has worked throughout his career. The presence of his engagement with Emmanuel Levinas and Martin Heidegger, which plays a more central role in his earlier work, for example, in Philosophy of Liberation (1977), is here informed by his extensive four book study of Karl Marx developed during the 1980s (1985–1990), and his subsequent engagement with the discourse ethics of Karl-Otto Apel and Jürgen Habermas (1994 and 1998). Here, Dussel engages in a broad dialogue with thinkers from other traditions. Dussel offers us an ethical Marx who is critical of the destruction of life and the alienation of the human under modern capitalism, coupled with a concern for the responsibility to the other, the excluded, the victim (foci taken from Levinas), and the necessary emphasis on the intersubjective character of ethics developed in Apel. Yet, Dussel’s thought is not reducible to the work of any one of these thinkers: he offers us a singularly new work, one which must be worked through in depth and studied with care if we are to answer the challenge of developing an ethics of liberation. The challenge of developing an ethics of liberation is a call to produce the flourishing of human life in an age where there is a greater degree of poverty and exclusion of large portions of humanity than at any other moment in human history. Dussel presents a challenge that is not just a theoretical call to revise and rethink our own ethical categories as we work beyond the impasses of neo-Aristoteleanism and neo-Kantianism, but a practical call: a philosophy which has as its aim not merely the interpretation of the world but its transformation. This call to transformation is the task of a practical and critical material philosophy in the same vein for which Marx famously advocated in his eleventh thesis on Feuerbach.

Timeless awareness is the essence of Dzogchen. Time experienced within timeless awareness is also an expression of the essence of Dzogchen. Dzogchen is an ancient form of Tibetan mystic humanism. Dzogchen makes the essential distinction between mind and awareness. A person can be located in mind alone and locked in time. As a person shifts from being located in mind alone (mindfulness) and goes beyond mind alone (mindfulness), one becomes aware of their own awareness. As we focus our awareness on our own innermost awareness, vast dimensions of awareness begin to open and self-reveal its nature to us. Awareness is a multidimensional experience and this awareness is infinite in its horizons. The innate qualities of awareness are spaciousness or openness or emptiness. Another quality of our awareness is luminous radiance and still another is awareness as energy. Awareness is alive and is both vast stillness and unceasing movement. The Union of Mind and Awareness When a person is able to experience the union of their mind and their awareness, then the person has a simultaneous experience of being in time and in timeless awareness. The mind is the place of thinking, feeling, sensation, memory and imagination and the mind is the mode of knowing singularity and difference in the world. This is the realm of ordinary knowingness and this is the realm of duality. Our mind is the realm of time. This time bound knowing is the knowing of you and I, us and them, this or that in time and place.

In his book, An Essay on Liberation, Marcuse presents his objectives of a radical transvaluation of values, the relaxation of taboos, cultural subversion and a linguistic rebellion that would amount to a methodical reversal of meaning of everything. He argues that through these transformations, a new language of rebellion will help redefine the paradigms and phenomena that long held in high esteem, thereby give rise to the liberation of the masses, minorities, the oppressed etc.

Although 1994 is popularly represented as a year of major transition from an oppressive society to a democratic one in South African history, it did not mark the end of White Supremacy but instead its evolution from one constitutional form into another. This is because the so-called “right of conquest” remains affirmed in South Africa by the much celebrated constitution Act 108 of 1996. Since the early 90s, Ubuntu has been employed by the elite parties involved in the “negotiations” for the transition to the “new” South Africa, to justify the new society. This perverse employment of Ubuntu has been largely supported with the aid of sophistic academic posturing by the largely white academic establishment in South Africa and its network of international allies. Using African philosophical hermeneutics as a method, we will ground another interpretation of Ubuntu which stems from two interrelated roots. The first root is a firm understanding of and engagement with the Bantu languages and cultures which are its primordial philosophical basis (and thus crucial) on the one hand. The second is the study of the history of Ubuntu as lived and living philosophy responding to the challenge of the conquest of the indigenous people in the unjust wars of colonisation. Towards this end we will draw from the experience of Ubuntu-inspired movements in the history of the wars of resistance and the struggle for liberation ongoing since 1652.

Desde sus comienzos, la Filosofía de la Liberación ha tenido como objetivo la construcción de un conocimiento crítico a partir de la situación de América Latina. Sin embargo, los esfuerzos por fundamentar epistemológicamente y metodológicamente una ciencia social crítica desde esta perspectiva ha sido considerablemente menor. Este artículo busca aportar a esta cuestión. A partir de un estudio de los aportes de Enrique Dussel, se propone distinguir la reflexión del método como ruptura teórica y como propuesta metodológica. El tratamiento de estos asuntos replantea un conjunto de problemas cruciales para la fundamentación de un programa de ciencias sociales críticas.

Jorge Zúñiga (coord.). Ponentes: Eduardo Mendieta, Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Yamandú Acosta, Amy Allen, Linda Alcoff, Adriana Arpini, Mauricio Beuchot, Santiago Castro-Gómez , Carlos Pereda, Jorge Armando Reyes, Ambrosio Velasco, Haydeé García Bravo, Silvana Rabinovich, Mario Ruiz Sotelo, Pedro E. García Ruiz, Frederick Mills, Jorge Zúñiga.

Philosophy and the social sciences, at least in modern times, are largely a by-product of the West -Europe and the Americas. This is to say that the West has a monopoly over these disciplines. This may be largely attributed to the colonial conquest of many territories by European powers and the resultant subjugation of the peoples concerned. Africans, by and large, are victims of such atrocities on the part of the West. Hence the question of an "African philosophy" arises, or gains momentum, in the (post) colonial era, or at independence. This is because the impulse to philosophise is inextricably linked to the impulse to gain freedom among the bonded. This paper attempts to show how the present subject, Archie Mafeje, dealt with the question of whether or not there exists an "African philosophy". In responding to the question, it will also be shown what philosophy really is (indeed, must have to be) and occasion will be had to remark as to its distinctive practices within the African context. This is to be understood as a broader philosophy of liberation which liberates philosophy from the received Euro-American contours and consequently liberates the colonised and oppressed, the African in particular, with its engagement with the (post) colonial, neo-colonial condition and remedies for the (dis)order thereof. 1 According to Sylvia Wynter (as quoted in White 2010, 131), "[w]hat is normally imperative to each culture as a living system is that it knows its reality adaptively, i.e. in ways that can best orient the collective behaviours of its subjects, together with its mode of subjectivity (the I) and of conspecificity (the We)". Furthermore, according to Derrick White (2010, 131), "Wynter's…scholarship has consistently explored and exposed how a particular society's intellectual class narratively instituted the idealized identity of self. According to Wynter, intellectuals, whether they are the clergy, the shamans, the soothsayers, the scientists, or the academics, create and re-create narratives of symbolic life and death that outline the local, culturally specific notions of what it means to be human. These narratives are paradigms of value and authority that associate positive and negative traits to particular behaviours, beliefs and ultimately groups who best exemplify them".

Roland Corbisier foi um filósofo e político brasileiro. O intelectual do ISEB publica neste livro conferências intituiladas "introdução aos problemas do Brasil" e "Filosofia no Brasil".

CORBISIER, R. Formação e problema da cultura brasileira.pdf

Enrique Dussel rethinks the concept of reason in relation to his project of liberation as a global dialogue between different geopolitical positions in opposition to the isolated task of an uprooted Cartesian thinker freed from materiality. Transmodernity aims to open up reason beyond its Eurocentric stronghold, to the pluriversality of the globe. Dussel finds resources for his project in the discourse ethics of Jürgen Habermas and Karl-Otto Apel, while he is at the same time critical of the neutral playing field or perfect symmetry under which a global rational dialogue might take place. In this chapter, I argue that Dussel’s emphasis on saving the reason of modernity from its violent excesses risks conceding too much to the reason of the center with the notion of dialogue. I argue that Dussel also gives us resources, and I think we should emphasize these, to orient our attention to the creativity of the transmodern project in the tensions that it produces with respect to the hegemonic geography of knowledge, rather than being limited to its moments of possible dialogue with the center. In closing, I turn to the thought of Frantz Fanon with the aim of engaging Dussel and Fanon in a decolonial inter-American dialogue. Fanon provides critical resources to think transmodern creative reason by illustrating the creative passions unleashed in the struggle for liberation.

This essay examines how the history of African Americans is understood and framed in terms of the development of their religious identities within the framework of the US nation-state. It first provides an overview of history and its relationship to religion before turning to a discussion of the transformation of Africans into blacks in America. It then considers the emergence of black theology and concludes by reflecting on historical redemption and contingency. IN this essay, I will examine the ways in which African American history is understood and framed in terms of the development of African American religious identities within the context of the US nation-state. A difficulty of achieving this task, however, is that history, African Americans, and the US nation-state are all modern developments, and religious identities-indeed, religion itself-while correctly applied to the context of these modern convergences are also at times done so through a fallacious retroactive ascription to past groups from which these modern ones are formed. Moreover, the expression "US nationstate" is one to which "nation-state" worked best during a period of a presumed racial integrity of the nation. Without that notion, the United States is properly a post-nationstate, by which is meant a state not premised on a single ethnic or racial nationality. A US citizen or resident could, in other words, be anybody. This discussion will therefore proceed through interrogating each layer before offering a discussion of their synthesis.

Leftists have often received the ethical phenomenology of Emmanuel Levinas with suspicion, on the grounds that it seems to lack a political appreciation of exploitation. While Levinas’s thought includes strong considerations of cultural particularity, his ethics also emphasizes responsibility to the physical suffering of the oppressed. A reading of Derrida’s approach to the political applications of Levinas’s thought reveals broader significance to elements of Levinas’s messianism than his Zionism first suggests. Building on this deconstructive reading, the respective works of Alphonso Lingis and Enrique Dussel emerge as new investigations of the political importance of Levinasan ethics to contemporary socialism.

Which conceptions of solidarity will help subjugated, oppressed groups pose liberatory challenges to the regimes under which they suffer? Activists and scholars concerned with liberation err by constraining solidarity to the parameters outlined in conventional moral and political theory and, therefore, by imagining solidarity as dependent on models of identity and shared interests. Organized movements may aim for expanded access to institutional claims and for cultural representation, and yet liberatory movements also have more specific objectives: to challenge the legitimacy of oppressive political and moral regimes, and to put those regimes in the obediential service of the vulnerable and oppressed. I critique notions of solidarity conceived in political philosophy as shared interests, and as a functions of identity in discourses about anti-racist, feminist, and pro-indigenous movements for social justice and cultural inclusion. Using the works of Enrique Dussel, Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, and Elaine Scarry, I argue that a notion of solidarity developed as a relational concept, primarily as a reference to the laborious activities of relating, can serve as a resource for liberatory projects once we describe the three main ideas as a coherent proposition: liberatory solidarity as relational. The concept refers to when individuals and groups continue to relate, to make one another, for the purposes of liberation despite countervailing exploitative power relations, incentives, and disincentives. Those seeking emancipatory change either labor to relate for the sake of liberation, or preserve the bigger-picture status quo in which disparate and episodic enclave movements rise and fall on the terms set by identity politics and fictive individualistic autonomy.

This essay explores the extent to which comparative philosophy can assist decolonial struggle. In order to accomplish this task, I offer not only a description of philosophy's colonization but also an account of how this discipline remains subject to the coloniality of knowledge. In short, insofar as race, gender, class, and sexuality are considered irrelevant or accidental to the production of philosophical knowledge, professional philosophy replicates, if not continues, what Rajeev Bhargava terms the epistemic injustice of colonialism. One response to the colonization of philosophy is "diversification" by means of putting into conversation philosophers , systems, and ideas from differing cultures or regions throughout the world. While a step forward, insofar as philosophical comparisons occur primarily on an East-West axis, philosophers are not necessarily addressing the biases, prejudices, racism, and exceptionalism endemic to their discipline. In fact, such a directionality typically reinforces the sense of historical development that undergirds Western philosophy's self-understanding. This essay, therefore, offers a series of recommendations for how to radicalize comparative philosophical efforts so as to address global epistemic injustice and aid in the process of decolonization.

" It is hard to overestimate the value of this volume for anyone approaching Habermas's thought. Allen and Mendieta have gathered an outstanding group of contributors, and the choice of concepts and topics is superb. No other living philosopher's work has more half-baked and completely unbaked opinions circulating around it. is volume should help ameliorate that problem and make the writings of this famously di cult thinker a good deal easier to engage. It is a real gem of scholarship. " STEPHEN K. W HITE John Hart Professor of Politics, University of Virginia Over a career spanning nearly seven decades, Jürgen Habermas – one of the most important European philosophers of the twentieth and twenty -rst centuries – has produced a prodigious and in uential body of work. In this Lexicon, authored by an international team of scholars, over 200 entries de ne and explain the key concepts, categories, philos-ophemes, themes, debates, and names associated with the entire constellation of Habermas's thought. e entries explore the historical, philosophical and social-theoretic roots of these terms and concepts, as well as their intellectual and disciplinary contexts, to build a broad but detailed picture of the development and trajectory of Habermas as a thinker. e volume will be an invaluable resource for students and scholars of Habermas, as well as for other readers in political philosophy, political science, sociology, international relations, cultural studies, and law.

Nietzsche ist mit dem 1887 erschienenen V. Buch der Fröhlichen Wissenschaft sein reifstes Aphorismen-Werk gelungen. Es handelt von der Heiterkeit der Zwischenzeit, in der die Befreiung des Geistes von Jahrtausende alten Vorurteilen gelingt, bis die von der Tragödie des Nihilismus erreicht werden, die zu ihrer Orientierung weiterhin feste Bindungen nötig haben. Viele der 40 + 1 Aphorismen gehören zu den prominentesten in Nietzsches Werk. Hier werden sie methodisch in ihren internen und externen Kontexten und ihrer stets aussagekräftigen schriftstellerischen Form erschlossen. Dabei werden neue Tiefen in Nietzsches Philosophie sichtbar.

Diagramação e capa: Lucas Fontella Margoni O padrão ortográfico, o sistema de citações e referências bibliográficas são prerrogativas do autor. Da mesma forma, o conteúdo da obra é de inteira e exclusiva responsabilidade de seu autor. Todos os livros publicados pela Editora Fi estão sob os direitos da Creative Commons 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/deed.pt_BR http://www.abecbrasil.org.br Dados Internacionais de Catalogação na Publicação (CIP) LIMA, Bruno Reikdal. Fetichização do poder como fundamento da corrupção: uma proposta a partir da filosofia latino-americana de Enrique Dussel [recurso eletrônico] / Bruno Reikdal Lima -Porto Alegre, RS: Editora Fi, 2018. 232 p. ISBN -978-85-5696-293-5 Disponível em: http://www.editorafi.org 1. Enrique Dussel. 2. Fetichização. 3. Filosofia latino-americana. 4. Corrupção I. Título. CDD-100 Índices para catálogo sistemático: 1. Filosofia 100

Enrique Dussel has developed a sweeping philosophical critique of the eurocentricity of Western habits of thought and action, with the aim of articulating an 'ethics of liberation' that takes the part distinctively of 'the victims' of the world system. The heart of Dussel's effort is an ostensibly new method, 'analectic' or 'anadialectic,' which comes about through the 'revelation' of the other, and goes beyond the self-enclosure that, Dussel asserts, typifies dialectic in Western ontology. Thus, he takes his position to have gone beyond ontology: it is a trans-ontology, a genuine meta-physics. I question whether analectic does go beyond Western thinking of being, and propose an ontological critique that is classically Western or, as I would prefer to say, historically Western yet (along with its analogues in other philosophical traditions) classically relevant even in our 'age of globalization and exclusion.'

In this paper I consider a problem that has plagued various versions of the philosophy of liberation. 1 On the one hand, proponents of the philosophy of liberation generally counsel that various forms of liberation in at least the Americas requires that we should fight Eurocentrism and resist the ontology and conceptual framework of Europe. On the other hand, most of the work done in this tradition relies heavily on the terminology and theoretical apparatus of various strands of European philosophy.

This essay develops on the aesthetic dimensions of decolonial thought in the work of Rodolfo Kusch and Enrique Dussel, who both point us to non-objectifying modes of thinking and being. Beyond a strictly epistemological approach, decolonial critique ought to offer an account of bodies, spaces, and movements that are the very condition of thought-that is to say, the condition of a mode of thinking otherwise, beyond the dominant colonial paradigm. This account of aesthetics involves the spacing and temporalizing of bodies as they live and move through the world, or what Alejandro Vallega calls living-thinking. The spacing-temporalizing of life points us also to the rhythm of life-life as movement, flow, and spacing. Turning to resistant epistemologies alongside the work of Omar Rivera, I consider how these epistemologies go beyond disembodied and abstracted ways of knowing as they sidestep the subject/object divide and engage sensuous and embodied dimensions of thinking, aesthetic experiences, diverse geographies, and histories. In closing, I argue that decolonial aesthetics also points us to a critique of the coloniality of space. Moving beyond a cartographic grid that attempts to capture subjects and spaces in advance on its coordinate plane, decolonial aesthetics opens onto the richness of embodied and cosmic spaces.

With Gianni Vattimo's late collaborative works with Santiago Zabala, Vat-timo is proving to be not only a philosopher of emancipatory hermeneutics but also one who is making his own distinct contribution to liberation philosophy. This article critically explores Vattimo's liberationist weak thought in the context of the New Mate-rialisms. Though Vattimo's post-metaphysical hermeneutics lacks the linkage with the natural sciences and eschews the development of a political ontology, which are both characteristic of the New Materialisms, his deliberate reactivation and rehabilitation of Marx by way of Heidegger eventuates in an expressed preferential option for the poor. This animating concern with what Vattimo and Zabala term " the discharge of capitalism " restores the original animating spirit of Marx's dialectical materialism and thus makes the political dimension latent in materialist thought explicit and provides a new species of the New Materialisms.

It is one thing to consider what human rights have been and another to inquire into what they could be. In this essay, I present a history of human rights vis-à-vis decolonization. I follow the scholarship of Samuel Moyn to suggest that human rights presented a “moral alternative” to political utopias. The question remains how to politicize the moral energy around human rights today. I argue that defending what Édouard Glissant calls a “right to opacity” could politicize the ethical energy around human rights today. Glissant’s right to opacity outlines a blueprint for the praxis of human rights to shift from a “functional model” to a “critical model,” to use Enrique Dussel’s distinction. My ultimate aim is to show how social movements around human rights and decolonization could converge today.

Link: https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0dj1b25s

Lewis Gordon received his Ph.D. in philosophy from Yale University in 1993, then taught in the philosophy department at Purdue until 1996. The following year, he moved to Brown University, where he is now chair of the Department of Africana Studies. He has had an equally significant and original impact in both domains. In Africana studies, Gordon has pursued an expansive concept of black identity that includes not only the United States and Canada, but Latin America and the multilingual Caribbean as well. In philosophy, he has resuscitated the tradition of existentialism, which was previously on the wane after the onslaught of antihumanism, poststructuralism, and other attacks on the theory of subjectivity that is the cornerstone of existentialism. For Gordon, existentialism is a vital tool in the project of developing a new humanities and new social theory, ones that can interrogate their Eurocentrism and base themselves more fully on the experiences of diverse peoples. Moreover, he argues that existentialism is critical for the development of African-American thought as well as for an analysis of racism in everyday life. He has developed these arguments in four books,

This is a book entitled "Philosophy of Liberation" by an Argentine philosopher, Enrique Dussel, in which the author calls all the philosophers of the Global South (including The Third World philosophers) for liberating their regional philosophies from the Global North philosophical domination that justifies global neo-colonial practices all over the world.

Which conceptions of solidarity will help subjugated, oppressed groups pose liberatory challenges to the regimes under which they suffer? Activists and scholars concerned with liberation err by constraining solidarity to the parameters outlined in conventional moral and political theory and, therefore, by imagining solidarity as dependent on models of identity and shared interests. Organized movements may aim for expanded access to institutional claims and for cultural representation, and yet liberatory movements also have more specific objectives: to challenge the legitimacy of oppressive political and moral regimes, and to put those regimes in the obediential service of the vulnerable and oppressed. I critique notions of solidarity conceived in political philosophy as shared interests, and as a functions of identity in discourses about antiracist, feminist, and pro-indigenous movements for social justice and cultural inclusion. Using the works of Enrique Dussel, Karl Marx, Friedri...

This essay offers an account of the philosophical significance of liberation and prescribes the special place the idea of liberation ought to hold in the context of inter-American philosophical dialogue. Drawing from Latin American liberation philosophy, as well as philosophical and theoretical discourses and debates that can be considered part of a larger liberatory tradition, my goal is to explore the idea of liberation as a process, or perhaps more appropriately a praxis, harboring both critical and creative potentialities.

In Twenty Theses on Politics, Argentine-Mexican philosopher Enrique Dussel compares the concept of people with two Indigenous terms: The Aztec altepetl and the Mayan Amaq’. Both concepts mean ‘community’ or ‘people,’ and ‘us/we.’ However, beyond his reference to Carlos Lenkersdorf’s book Filosofar en clave tojolabal (Philosophizing in Tojolabal Code), Dussel delves not further into these Indigenous words and their implications to understand what he means by people. Focusing on the work of Carlos Lenkersdorf (2005), Gladys Tzul Tzul (2018), Alejandra Aquino Moreschi (2013), Raúl Madrid (2014) and Josef Estermann (2006), I shall examine how the political proceeding of distinct Latin American Indigenous communities, literally changes the manner in which Dussel’s concept of people is understood in non-Indigenous realities. Indeed, among Indigenous peoples, a search for an alternative political system is commonplace. I will examine that search especially in the Tojol ab’al, K’iche’, and Andean instance; and, taking guidance from Dussel’s notion of people, I will examine how there may be a solution to be found in the political participation of the citizenry made by consensus. This political resolution may, in turn, be instrumental in the creation of a new notion of the ‘we’ in non-Indigenous realities.

El artículo tiene como objetivo presentar algunas coordenadas inscriptas en el libro de Enrique Dussel 20 tesis de política cuya publicación constituye una invitación al debate sobre temas como la política, lo político, el poder, las instituciones y la posibilidad de praxis de los oprimidos. A partir de presentar las sucesivas tesis y la arquitectura del pensamiento político de Dussel se propone una discusión sobre los ejes de debates propuestos por el autor y los diálogos filosóficos que entabla. Además se advierte sobre la urgente necesidad de avanzar en algunos de los temas planteados como una forma de ejercer el pensamiento orientado a la crítica transformadora de las situaciones de dominación vigentes.

La filosofía de la liberación de Enrique Dussel ha propuesto a la analéctica como su método de reflexión filosófica. Sin embargo, a la hora de pensar una epistemología para las ciencias sociales críticas (consistente con esta filosofía) se evidencian varios temas no estudiados. Este artículo propone observar tres de estos aspectos epistemológicos claves: la construcción de la objetividad, el criterio de demarcación y de verdad, y la lógica de la investigación. A partir de identificar alcances y limitaciones en el tratamiento del tema en la obra de Dussel, se espera contribuir a clarificar la agenda para una fundamentación de las ciencias sociales críticas en el paradigma de la filosofía de la liberación.

This is a commentary on “The Liberatory Event of Paul Tarsus” by Enrique Dussel (2009),
a part of the third volume of Dussel’s Politics of Liberation. The article’s author seeks to show how
Dussel reads Paul in a dialectical way, in what we can call a prismatic hermeneutical way, namely, first
by attending to the Sitz im Leben, the historical-interpretative, context in which Paul produced his
own texts, and how that existential and historical situation continues to disrupt the Pauline texts;
second, by attending to ways in which this Sitz im Leben, has been excluded, concealed and negated
when appropriating Paul’s texts; third, by reading Paul against our own contemporary problems
and questions. It is by reading Paul against and through his Sitz im Leben, the author argues that
Dussel is able to show how there are in Paul’s letters a series of “critical categories”—to use the
expression he uses in our text (Dussel 2009:115)—that can and must be recovered for the sake of a
critical, liberatory political philosophy. In a third and final part, the author turns to Dussel’s reading
of Agamben, as is articulated in the text before us, in order to show that while Agamben is closer to
Dussel than Dussel himself is willing to acknowledge, Agamben falls short of what Dussel’s
prismatic hermeneutics accomplishes—namely to show the way in which Paul can indeed be read
in a philosophical-political way that does not retreat behind to a political-theological reading that
closes off both Paul as a “sacred” text to innovative readings, nor closes off our political reality to a
religious critique. The philosophical-political reading of a religious text can yield a religious critique
of fetishized political institutions and ways of thinking that in turn may generate new critical
categories. A philosophical-political reading of sacred texts may also yield a political-economic critique, as Marx so eloquently illustrated (see Dussel 2007)

Life and the will to live are at the foundation of both the ethics and the politics of liberation, with life understood as the vital source and measure of all human institutions, values, and norms. Indeed, the central theme of Enrique Dussel's Ethics of Liberation in the Age of Globalization and Exclusion is the materiality of human life as the foundation and critical touchstone for an ethics of liberation. The appearance of this fundamental category expands the frame of his ethics beyond earlier works inspired by Heidegger and later Levinas. Dussel encounters the category of life in his extensive and detailed studies of Marx in the 1980s into the early 90s, when he finds the key concept of Marx's four drafts of Capital to be that of living labor. Living labor is the force that animates the dead labor congealed within capital and, yet, it remains irreducibly exterior to capital. Living labor is a condition of possibility for capital, yet never fully subsumed by its dialectical machinations. Thus, Dussel fuses his earlier Levinasian notions of totality, exteriority, and the Other with a Marxian notion of life, as vital and irreducible animating force. In Dussel's ethics, the materiality of life will serve as a constant referent for both the critical task of liberation and as counter to the empty formalism of the neo-Kantian ethics of Habermas, Apel, and Rawls. Dussel argues for an ethics that articulates together the material and the formal spheres: that is to say, the materiality of life together with the community of reason that sets ends for itself. Materiality, thus, achieves its most developed formation at the intersubjective level by the formal processes of reasoning. Yet, there is always the remainder of life that is not subsumed within the formalization of moral rules or the institutionalization of political laws: the life and lives that are excluded, forgotten, oppressed, suffering under the given moral and political system. Dussel refers to the excluded or those who experience the negation of life as the victim(s). The exteriority of the lives of the victims serves as the critical point of transformation vis-à-vis the goodness claims of the prevailing moral system, when they have become fetishized and no longer produce the conditions of life that they claim for their basis of legitimacy. In this chapter, I elaborate Dussel's understanding of the normative and revolutionary force of life both at the foundation of all moral and ethical claims, and also as ana-dialectical (analectic) exteriority. The analectic is not just the dialectical movement beyond totality via negation but "the affirmation of exteriority." The analectic exteriority of life involves a vital upsurge that breaches the enclosure and totality of the system. First, I demonstrate how Dussel grounds his ethics on a material notion of life and how he differentiates his notion of material ethics from other materialist ethics such as utilitarianism. Next, I show how Dussel maintains that this material principle must also be co-constitutive with the principle of formal intersubjectivity.

Linda Alcoff interviews Lewis Gordon on Africana philosophy in Africana Studies, relationships between Africana Studies and Latin American Studies, existential phenomenology, relational theories of race, invisibility and anonymity, and a variety of themes in his thought.

Drawing upon the theory of disciplinary decadence and what it means to transcend it through a teleological suspension of disciplinarity, this article explores Enrique Dussel's conceptions of ethics, history, modernity, and philosophy through reflections from an afternoon walk with him through Morelia, Mexico, whose history is the basis of one of his doctoral dissertations.

The theme of this master thesis is the interpretation of the agrarian property, from constitutionalized legal grounds, based on the Philosophy of Liberation hermeneutic proposal developed by the philosopher Enrique Dussel and on the changes in the agrarian property caused by the Latin-American New Constitutionalism. The work aims to provide new foundations for the study of agrarian law, in a context of paradigmatic crisis, through the development of new theoretical models that rearticulate legal thought before institutional transformations. The research is theoretical and it is based primarily in the works of Dussel, and in the constitutions of Venezuela, Ecuador and Bolivia. It can be concluded, according to Dussel, that praxis is the foundation and condition to the understanding of subjects in community and that linguisticity, instrumentality, historicity and intersubjectivity are articulated in the necessarily intentional and projective constitution sense, in view of, ultimately, the care of specific needs of the subjects living in community. Law is constituted in the praxis of subjects such as mediation institutionalized by power to satisfy those needs in everyday life and in multiple fields of existence. The Philosophy of Liberation, in turn, worries about the situation of domination, victimization, denial of rights, alienation that precludes the exercise of authentic interpretation, non participation in the institutionalization of law and its meaning as well as the instrumentalization of the interpreter for strange understanding that are negativ to their needs. In this sense, the modern property is interpreted in itseconomic, ecological, cultural, legal and geopolitical negativity, from the revelation of the mechanisms that make it servesto a project that denies the dignity of nature and human work for the benefit of a economic world system that pressuposes and asserts itself with the generation of systemic poverty, non-central countries dependency in the world-system, environmental and cultural destruction, and denial of rights. The crisis of this world system opens new institutional possibilities and demands the affirmation of new projects for Latin American peoples, with the consequent need for statement of rights. In this context, the LatinAmerican Transformative Constitutionalism faces the issue of access to land and denies the negativity of modern agrarian property in its various dimensions, through his transformation, and in view of new rights. This positivity from the victimsconstitute new foundations for the legal use of the land and transform the agrarian property models of interpretation

Resumo: Las Casas é um personagem mais famoso do que conhecido. Com exceção da Brevíssima relación de la destrucción de las Índias, que teve uma imensa repercussão desde sua época até os nosso dias, suas prin-cipais obras permaneceram inéditas até a publicação da Opera Omnia em quatorze volumes nas últimas décadas do século passado. Las Casas foi um homem de ação e de parte: depois da "conversão" à causa indígena, toda a sua ação e o seu pensamento foram inteiramente dedicados à defesa dos direitos dos índios americanos. Isto não lhe impediu de produzir uma obra de grande envergadura teórica que contribuiu em vários campos do saber, da antropologia à história, do direito à teoria política, da teologia à retórica. Las Casas foi e continua sendo um personagem polêmico que * Professor no PPG em Filosofia da Universidade Federal da Paraíba (UFPB) e coorde-nador do Núcleo de Cidadania e Direitos Humanos da UFPB. Atualização e comple-mentação de original publicado em "Vozes Silenciadas: ensaios sobre ética e filosofia política", organizado por Cecília Pires (Editora Unijuí, 2003). A coordenação da Fi-losofazer agradece à gentileza do professor Giuseppe Tosi por nos confiar a reedição deste artigo e por ter brindado o público passofundense com um Minicurso sobre Las Casas e os Direitos Humanos durante do IV Colóquio Nacional de Direitos Humanos, realizado de 12 a 16 de abril de 2010.