
159
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https://doi.org/10.19053/01235095.v8.n31.2022.14808
Other, oppressed and excluded, is the subject of his philosophy because he
himself, Enrique Dussel, thinks of himself as such.
We consider it important to note that the philosophy of liberation in general
and the work of these two philosophers can be read within the framework
of the philosophy of the decolonial turn. This is especially true of Dussel’s
work. A few representatives of the philosophy of the decolonial turn inter-
pret and develop his ideas in a certain way. For example, Lewis Gordon
believes that the consciousness of the indigenous population of the colonized
territories cannot be characterized as either pre-modern or post-modern, but
only as “thoroughly modern” (Gordon, 2013, p. 69). For Walter Mignolo,
the term borrowed from Dussel turns out to be important – “the geopoli-
tics of knowledge”. Based on it, he builds his theory representing the glob-
al geopolitical situation as the interaction of central and peripheral groups,
where central groups create knowledge, classications and hierarchy, and
manage them, placing themselves at the top of the hierarchy, and peripheral
groups perceive this knowledge as the basis of worldview and cognition,
and are also classied and integrated into the hierarchy created by the rst
(Mignolo, 2000, p. 29). Another thinker, Nelson Maldonado-Torres, ques-
tions the need for Dussel to apply Levinas’ categories in the eld of social re-
lations (Maldonado-Torres, 2008, p. 187), but borrows from him the concept
of “trans-modernity” (p. 226). It is also worth mentioning Ramon Grosfogel
(2009), who draws attention to the problem of the decolonization of knowl-
edge and power, as well as to the political and economic characteristics of the
world system. This development of the ideas of the philosophy of liberation
can be characterized as epistemological decolonization, but we interpret this
development rather as the radicalization of the thought of Enrique Dussel
and the philosophy of liberation. In our view of the philosophy of liberation,
we adhere more to the views of Raúl Fornet-Betancourt, a well-known rep-
resentative and researcher of the philosophy of liberation. His position is that
the philosophy of liberation should be read as an anti-imperialist discourse,
historically developed as anti-imperialist thinking and theory (pensamiento y
teoría antiimperialista). For him, the ideas of the decolonial turn are a tribute
to the Zeitgeist dominant in the West (Zeitgeist dominante), which do not
provide answers to the challenges of modernity facing the peoples of Latin
America, while the philosophy of liberation appeared thanks to these chal-
lenges and works with them (Fornet-Betancourt, 2017, p. 118).