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.

Leopoldo Zea Aguilar was born in 1912 in Mexico City, the son of a working-class postal employee. He read philosophy at the National Autonomous University of Mexico under Jose Gaos, the Spanish refugee philosopher who had translated Heidegger into Spanish, and took his doctorate in 1944 with a dissertation on Mexican positivism. He spent the rest of his career at UNAM, directing the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters and the Centre for Latin American Studies that he founded.

His major works are Positivism in Mexico (1943), The Latin American Mind: Sources and Meaning of Its Philosophical Thought (1949), America as Conscience (1953), The Latin American as Such (1969), Philosophy of American History (1978), and Discourse from the Marginalization and the Barbarism. He edited and wrote introductions for the Tierra Firme series of Latin American philosophy with the Fondo de Cultura Economica, shaping the canon for two generations of readers.

Zea's project was the elaboration of an authentically Latin American philosophy from the historical experience of the conquered, the colonized, and the marginalized — one that engaged with European philosophy without being defined by it. His writings, translated into many languages, made him the principal twentieth-century philosopher of Latin Americanism. He died in Mexico City in June 2004.