Decolonizing Ethics: Enrique Dussel’’s Ethics of Liberation

Enrique Dussel is Latin America’s foremost philosopher, renowned for his contributions to ethics, political philosophy, and liberation theology. Designed for classroom use, this collection of essays engages with Dussel’s encyclopedic work, making his valuable contributions accessible to English-speaking students.

In addition to being one of the most original, prolific, and widely known members of the Latin American Philosophy of Liberation movement, Dussel has also made important contributions to world philosophy, the history of philosophy, the history of the Catholic Church in Latin America, and the understanding of Karl Marx. Dussel famously engaged in a decade-long debate with Karl-Otto Apel on the relationship between material and formal ethics--that is, between an ethics of the community of life and an ethics of the community of discourse--and he has produced novel interpretations and analyses of the concepts of alterity, exteriority, the other, and the world history of ethical systems. Most recently, Dussel extended his work on an ethics of liberation into a politics of liberation, developed over the course of three published volumes.

In this book, scholars from around the world assess Dussel’s work in ways that are both appreciative and critical. Two essays by Dussel bookend the volume: the collection opens with a consideration of the (im)possibility of multiple modernities and ends with an autobiographical trajectory of the philosopher’s thinking.

In addition to Dussel and the editors, the contributors to this volume include Linda Martín Alcoff, Don Thomas Deere, Oscar Guardiola-Rivera, Mario Sáenz Rovner, Alejandro A. Vallega, and Jorge Zúñiga M.

Amy Allen is Liberal Arts Professor of Philosophy and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and Head of the Department of Philosophy at Penn State University. She is the coeditor, with Eduardo Mendieta, of From Alienation to Forms of Life: The Critical Theory of Rahel Jaeggi and Justification and Emancipation: The Critical Theory of Rainer Forst, both published by Penn State University Press.

Eduardo Mendieta is Professor of Philosophy and Associate Director of the Rock Ethics Institute at Penn State University. He is the coeditor, with Amy Allen, of From Alienation to Forms of Life: The Critical Theory of Rahel Jaeggi and Justification and Emancipation: The Critical Theory of Rainer Forst, both published by Penn State University Press.