Leopoldo Zea Quotes on Politics
Leopoldo Zea's mature political thought, developed across The Latin American Mind (1949), Philosophy as Commitment (1952), and the long subsequent corpus, presses the case that authentic Latin American political knowledge must arise from the situated historical conditions of the region rather than be imported as a derivative of European political categories. The framework treats the abstract universalisms of metropolitan liberalism and Marxism alike as themselves historically located products of European experience whose mechanical application to Latin American conditions reproduces the colonial subordination they purport to overcome. Zea's work supplied the immediate philosophical background to the philosophy-of-liberation movement that Dussel, Roig, and others would carry forward from the 1970s onward.
Quotes
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Attributed to Leopoldo Zea:
“Latin American philosophy is born of the encounter of cultures.”
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Attributed to Leopoldo Zea:
“We can be ourselves only by recognizing what we share with others.”
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Attributed to Leopoldo Zea:
“Philosophy in our America must be a philosophy of liberation.”
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Attributed to Leopoldo Zea:
“The Other is the question Latin America has always asked.”
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Attributed to Leopoldo Zea:
“Authentic universality is reached only through what is one's own.”
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“The nobility... of the Argentine people, in this square and all the country’s squares, causes us to offer our hand to the adversary, but this must not be taken as weak- ness. If it is necessary, the people, whose feelings I try to interpret as President of the nation, will be ready... to offer a hand, a gesture of peace with nobility and in a gesture of peace with honour, but they will also be ready to teach a lesson to anyone who dares to touch a square metre of Argentine territory.”
Speech , 10 April 1982