Enrique Dussel's writings span the theology of liberation, critiques of discourse ethics, evaluations of Marx, Levinas, Habermas, and others, but most importantly, the development of a philosophy written from the underside of Eurocentric modernist teleologies, an ethics of the impoverished, and the articulation of a unique Latin American theoretical perspective. This anthology of original articles by U.S. philosophers elucidating Dussel's thought, offers critical analyses from a variety of perspectives, including feminist ones. Also included is an essay by Dussel that responds to these essays.
Enrique Dussel's writings span the theology of liberation, critiques of discourse ethics and evaluations of Marx, Levinas, Habermas, and others. This anthology of articles by US philosophers elucidating Dussel's thought offers critical analyses from a variety of perspectives.
Enrique Ambrosini Dussel is and has been one of the most prolific Latin American philosophers of the last 100 years. He has written over fifty books, and over three hundred articles ranging over the history of the Latin American philosophy, political philosophy, church history, theology, ethics, and occasional pieces on the state of Latin American countries. Dussel is first and foremost a moral philosopher, a philosopher of liberation. But for him, philosophy must be liberated so that it may contribute to social liberation. In one sense, "beyond philosophy" means to go beyond contemporary, academicized, professionalized, and "civilized" philosophy by turning to all that demystifies the autonomy of philosophy and turns our attention to its sources. "Beyond philosophy," also means to go beyond philosophy in the Marxian sense of abolishing philosophy by realizing it. This is the definitive English language collection of Dussel's enormous body of work. It will allow the reader to get a good sense of the breath and depth of Dussel's opus, covering four major areas: ethics, economics, history, and liberation theology.
Two Volume Set Original Line Drawings by Helen Barchilon Redman The Underside of History, now available in a revised, two-volume edition, offers a new generation of scholars and students an alternative to the traditional courtesans/queens/mothers/and mistresses view of women in history. This classic in feminist literature provides an account of women's creativity in every age from pre-history to the present, and attempts to view women's roles in the context of the total time span of human experience. In clear and elegant prose, the author takes us on a breathtaking tour through time: we move through the hundred-thousand-year wanderings of the Paleolithic into the great transition from hunting and gathering to herding and planting; from life inside city walls to the great primary civilizations of the Middle East and Asia, as well as the feudal civilizations on its fringes; and from the sweep of culture generated by the Greco-Romanic-Islamic empires to "European Enlightenment" and, finally, to the last two centuries and the gradual industrialization-urbanization of the planet. New to this volume is a look at the 20th century women's movement--including a chapter on Third World women--as well as a provocative epilogue entitled "Creating Futures for the 21st Century." When we look at the imbalances regarding women in the social record, we are not simply gleaning information about the status of women: we are getting clues about general imbalances within society at large. For this reason, students, professionals, and practitioners alike will find The Underside of History to be an invigorating intellectual exercise and an essential addition to their libraries. "It is a classic, in all meaningsof the word. This book contains a lot of important information and shows us how to re-vision history and historical data. It won't 'scare' men or newcomers to women's studies." --Elizabeth Moen, University of Colorado, Boulder "Its presentation of this 'forgotten' histo
"Real" knowing always involves a political dimension, Linda Martín Alcoff suggests. But this does not mean we need to give up realism or the possibility of truth. Recent work in continental philosophy insists on the influence that power and desire exert on knowing, whereas contemporary analytic philosophy largely ignores these political concerns in its accounts of justification and truth. Alcoff engages these traditionally conflicting approaches in a constructive dialogue, effectively spanning the analytic/continental divide.In provocative readings of major figures in the continental tradition, Alcoff shows that the work of Hans-Georg Gadamer and Michel Foucault can help rectify key problems in coherence epistemology, such as the link between coherence and truth. She also argues that discussions about knowledge among continental philosophers can benefit from the work of analytic philosophers Donald Davidson and Hilary Putnam on meaning and ontology. Alcoff makes a compelling case for the need to address truth as a metaphysical issue, in contrast to minimalist tendencies in Anglo-American philosophy and deconstructionism on the continent. Her work persuasively argues for coherentist epistemology as a more realistic reconfiguration of the ontology of truth.
Dussel (ethics, Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico) shows how North American and European philosophies have failed to give historically faithful analysis of the genesis of the "myth" of modernity, and have never engaged in a serious questioning of their own Eurocentric presuppositions. He contends that North American and European philosophers have fallen into a false belief that there is a linear sequence that moves from the premodern to the modern, developed, and industrialized. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
In Democracy's Reconstruction, the latest addition to Cathy Cohen and Fredrick Harris's Transgressing Boundaries series, noted political theorist Lawrie Balfour challenges a longstanding tendency in political theory: the disciplinary division that separates political theory proper from the study of black politics. Political theory rarely engages with black political thinkers, despite the fact that the problem of racial inequality is central to the entire enterprise of American political theory. To address this lacuna, she focuses on the political thought of W.E.B. Du Bois, particularly his longstanding concern with the relationship between slavery's legacy and the prospects for democracy in the era he lived in. Balfour utilizes Du Bois as an intellectual resource, applying his method of addressing contemporary problems via the historical prism of slavery to address some of the fundamental racial divides and inequalities in contemporary America. By establishing his theoretical method to study these historical connections, she positions Du Bois's work in the political theory canon--similar to the status it already has in history, sociology, philosophy, and literature.
Argentinean philosopher, theologian, and historian Enrique Dussel understands the present international order as divided into the "culture of the center" -- by which he means the ruling elite of Europe, North America, and Russia -- and "the peoples of the periphery" -- by which he means the populations of Latin America, Africa, and part of Asia, and the oppressed classes (including women and children) throughout the world. In 'Philosophy of Liberation,' he presents a profound analysis of the alienation of peripheral peoples resulting from the imperialism of the center for more than five centuries. Dussel's aim is to demonstrate that the center's historic cultural, military, and economic domination of poor countries is 'philosophically' founded on North Atlantic onthology. By expressing supposedly universal knowledge, European philosophies, argues Dussel, have served to equate the cultural standards, modes of behavior, and rationalistic orientation of the West with human nature and to condemn the unique characteristics of peripheral peoples as "nonbeing, nothing, chaos, irrationality." Hence, Western philosophies have historically legitimated and hidden the domination that oppressed cultures have suffered at the hands of the center. Dussel probes multinational corporations, the communications media, and the armies of the center with their counterparts among the Third World elite. The creation of a just world order in the future, according to Dussel, hinges on the liberation of the periphery, based on a philosophy that is able to "think the world" from the perspective of the poor and to reclaim the Third World's distinct cultural inheritance, which is imbedded in the popular cultures of the poor. Apart from the liberation of the periphery, there will be no future: "the center will feed itself on the sameness it has ingrained within itself. The death of the child, of the poor, will be its own death." This is a disquieting but stimulating book for scholars and advanced students of philosophy, ethics, liberation theology, and global politics.
This book is a political and theological reflection on the violence and injustice that has taken place in Mexico and Central America since 2006 as a result of the drug war. In order to understand and respond to this conflict in the age of globalization, William A. Walker III combines the work of philosopher Enrique Dussel and theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar to develop a theology of the drug war that transcends both a Eurocentric conception of the world and a merely political account of salvation. Walker also highlights examples of Christian and church-based approaches to practicing neighborliness and resistance to drug trade-related violence, challenging both Christians and non-Christians to participate in the creation of a more just and merciful society.
