Enrique Dussel

Dussel trained in Europe, in Freiburg and Paris, in the same phenomenological tradition that shaped much of twentieth-century continental philosophy, then carried its tools home to Latin America and turned them against the very civilization that had produced them. His concept of transmodernity holds that modernity is not the universal, neutral achievement of reason it presents itself as, but a story Europe tells about itself that depends on erasing the conquest, slavery, and extraction that made European wealth and self-confidence possible in the first place: 1492 belongs at the center of the story of modernity, not its margins. Working alongside economists and theologians, he helped found the philosophy of liberation, a movement built on a basic reversal: instead of theorizing justice from the perspective of an already-comfortable center and extending charity outward, start philosophy from the position of the poor, the colonized, the excluded, the ones a system's violence normally makes invisible to itself. A priest turned into a political target during Argentina's military dictatorship, he survived a bomb attack on his home in 1973 and spent years in exile in Mexico, where he wrote most of his major work and helped build one of Latin America's most influential schools of thought.