About the beginning, fifty years later

Challenges for a "new generation" of the Philosophy of Liberation

Abstract

This article explores publications that initiated the Philosophy of Liberation, with the intention of pointing out some conditions for the reactivation of certain ideas and lines of work present in them. First, it examines the relationship between Philosophy of Liberation and Latin American philosophy in the context of a counterpoint between two journals that appeared almost simultaneously in the mid-1970s. In this context, Francisco Miró Quesada is hailed as an exceptionary exemplar of how to navigate certain tensions within this framework. Additionally, other influential texts on the Philosophy of Liberation will be taken up in order to problematise the meaning and scope of the foundational operation carried out in them, with particular attention to the way in which it has affected the configuration of the Argentinean philosophical field. At this stage, two main conceptions of the project are distinguished, which generate different perspectives depending on their hierarchy: "the metaphysics of otherness" or "national liberation". Finally, some inherent tensions resulting from these options are emphasized in order to identify certain decisions against which any attempt to recover and relaunch this project would have to contend.