Leopoldo Zea 1912 – 2004

Leopoldo Zea was a Mexican philosopher and the principal figure of the philosophy of Latin American identity in the second half of the twentieth century. A student of Jose Gaos, the Spanish exile who introduced Heidegger to Mexican philosophy, he taught at the National Autonomous University of Mexico for more than fifty years. His Latin American Mind and The Role of the Americas in History argued that Latin American philosophy must take its own historical situation as its starting point and that authentic philosophy emerges from the encounter of cultures rather than from a universal viewpoint.