* Book: Enrique Dussel: The Underside of Modernity. Apel, Ricoeur, Rorty, Taylor and the philosophy of liberation.

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Enrique Dussel:

"This book gathers some of the essays which are fruits of recent debates and dialogues that have only just begun. The Philosophy of Liberation that I practice, not only in Latin America, but also regarding all types of oppression on the planet (of women, the discriminated races, the exploited classes, the marginalized poor, the impoverished countries, the old and homeless exiled and buried in shelters and asylums, the local religions, the homeless and orphaned children (a lost generation) of inhospitable cities, the systems destroyed by capital and the market... in short, the immense majority of humanity), begins a dialogue with the hegemonic European-North American philosophical community. The works here presented all gravitate around one central theme: eurocentrism and the invisibility of "economics" that in turn prevent the development out of poverty of the greater part of humanity as a fundamental philosophical and ethical theme."

(https://transmodernism.files.wordpress.com/2008/02/dussel_underside_modernity.pdf)

"In the first part of this book, in fact, the essay "Liberation Philosophy from the Praxis of the Oppressed" was presented at the First International Congress of Latin American Philosophy that took place in the city of Juárez (Mexico), May 1990, and in which I situated some issues in debate from the perspective of my re-interpretation of Marx's work, and from my critique of machismo, a problem that I began to reformulate in this work and which will be the object of future explicit studies in Ethics of Liberation, under redaction. On 25 November 1989, two weeks before the so-called fall of the Berlin Wall-news of which I received on 9 December from Agnes Heller before I was to give a lecture on "The Four Redactions of Capital" at the New School for Social Research in New York-I delivered a work in German on the "Introduction to Apel's Transformation of Philosophy and Liberation Philosophy", which had been requested by Raúl Fornet-Betancourt of Aachen, in order to initiate a dialogue with Apel's discourse ethics from the perspective of liberation philosophy. This was only a beginning.

In another work, therefore, which is here the second essay, "The Reason of the Other: 'Interpellation' as Speech Act", I presented the clarification and development of my position in Freiburg. This work was presented originally in March of 1991 at a seminar organized in Mexico. The last part of this essay, and the latter sections of the work dedicated to a dialogue with Ricoeur, share some similarities given that my intention was to note the urgency of a return, "against fashion," to the philosophical and critical discourse of Marx (which I articulated without contradiction in my interpretation of several volumes with respect to Levinas and as a function of a philosophical discourse on the liberation of the poor of the earth).

The third work, “Toward a North-South Dialogue”, was presented in Ger- man on 14 March 1992, in Bad-Homburg (next to Frankfurt), on the occasion of Karl-Otto Apel's seventieth birthday, and was later published by Suhrkamp in a Festschrift for Apel.

The fourth work, “From the Skeptic to the Cynic”, was presented in Ger- man at a conference which took place in Mainz, 11 April 1992, as the third stage in the dialogue that had begun in Freiburg in 1989.

The fifth work, in French, “Hermeneutics and Liberation”, requested by Domenico Jervolino, professor at the University of Naples, was a lecture that served as the basis for a dialogue with Paul Ricoeur, which took place in the university on 16 April 1991. I had already spoken with Ricoeur on the theme in January of 1990 in Rome, on the occasion of a seminar on ethics which had taken place at the Lateranense University, and during a trip I made to Chicago to meet and talk at length during a most amicable evening with my old professor from the Sorbonne.

The sixth work, “A 'Conversation' with Richard Rorty”, I prepared in order to be able to exchange some ideas with Rorty on the occasion of his visit to us in Mexico, 2-5 July 1991. We were only able to converse a little with Rorty. However, given that I had read his work expressly for this encounter, this was enough in order to understand better his thought "in action, "personally. To the question whether «the exploitation of Latin America, or of poor North- Americans, is a fact caused by capitalism?," Rorty answered: "I do not know!" He exclaimed doubtfully, “Is there in any event a system without exploitation?” -which contained, without him noticing it, an affirmative answer to my question.

The seventh work, «Modernity, Eurocentrism" and Trans-Modernity," I wrote when Charles Taylor had been invited to hold a seminar in Mexico, in 1992 (but which was later postponed). The philosopher of the “ethical life” and "authenticity," who has so many merits for cultures which would like to affirm their identity, I had to submit to some critiques which nevertheless do not diminish his historical work.

In the second part, the eighth work is the first written entry of Apel in the debate-since in 1991, in Mexico, Apel had made only an extemporaneous presentation, situating himself still at the level of a clarification of context and methodology, and manifesting in his critique, in any event, an extremely open position toward the problem of the South. This work has been included here in order to give greater clarity to the breadth and depth of the debate. Ricoeur's answer, the ninth work, "Philosophy and Liberation", delivered at the meeting that took place in Naples, consists in admitting, in certain way, the lack of an economics in his own discourse, but concerns itself primarily with demonstrating the danger of an economics without politics.

It is for this reason that in the tenth contribution, "On World System, Politics, and the Economics of Liberation Philosophy", I began an answer, initially to Ricoeur-the logic of the argumentation required it so-in order to later focus almost exclusively on Apel."

(https://transmodernism.files.wordpress.com/2008/02/dussel_underside_modernity.pdf)

Underside of Modernity

Contents

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Contents

ToC

PART ONE

1 LIBERATION PHILOSOPHY FROM THE PRAXIS OF THE OPPRESSED

2 THE REASON OF THE OTHER: "INTERPELLATION" AS SPEECH-ACT

3 TOWARD A NORTH-SOUTH DIALOGUE

4 FROM THE SKEPTIC TO THE CYNIC

5 HERMENEUTICS AND LlBERATION

6 A "CONVERSATION" WITH RICHARD RORTY

7 MODERNITY, EUROCENTRISM, AND TRANS-MODERNITY: IN DIALOGUE WITH CHARLES TAYLOR

PART TWO

8 RESPONSE BY KARL-OTTO APEL: DISCOURSE ETHICS BEFORE THE CHALLENGE OF LIBERATION PHILOSOPHY

9 RESPONSE BY PAUL RICOEUR: PH1LOSOPHY AND LIBERATION

10 RESPONSE BY ENRIQUE DUSSEL: WORLD SYSTEM, POLITICS, AND THE ECONOMICS OF LIBERATION PHILOSOPHY

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