A tradition that begins in conquest: the sixteenth-century argument over whether Indigenous peoples were fully human, fought out between Bartolomé de las Casas and the apologists of empire — and still organized, four centuries later, around identity, coloniality, and liberation.
In Defense of the Indians, Ethics of Liberation, Coloniality of Power
Origins & Development
Scholastic philosophy arrives with the conquest; the Valladolid debate (1550–1551) between Las Casas and Sepúlveda over the justice of empire is its founding scene.
Indigenous and mestizo intellectual traditions persist beneath and beside it — the indigenous philosophy of Mesoamerica and the Andes.
Nineteenth-century independence thinkers (Bello, Sarmiento) work on civilization, race, and nation-building in a European key.
The twentieth century brings a distinctive turn: liberation theology in religion, and a philosophy of liberation (Dussel) that re-centers the excluded — the "poor" and the barbaros — as the standpoint of critique.
Central Ideas
Coloniality: Quijano's coloniality of power — political independence did not end the colonial control of knowledge, being, and labor.
Transmodernity: Dussel's answer to postmodernism — a future built from the encounter of peripheral traditions, not the end of history.
Liberation:ethics of liberation prioritizes the claims of victims of the prevailing system over procedural consensus.
Hybridity and borderlands: from hybridity to Lugones's decolonial feminism, the tradition theorizes identity as mixed, contested, and political.
Schools & Key Figures
Colonial scholasticism: Las Casas's defense of Indigenous rationality against Aristotle-based hierarchies.
Liberation philosophy: Dussel, Fanon (the Francophone bridge), and the dependency-theory conversations of the 1970s.
Decolonial theory: Quijano, Walter Mignolo, Lugones — the coloniality framework and its global uptake.
"Coloniality" has become a standard analytic across postcolonial studies worldwide — see the site's postcolonialism cluster.
Liberation philosophy's option for the poor echoes through political theology and political philosophy.
The field is now institutionalized: journals, associations, and a canon debate over whether "Latin American philosophy" is a set of ideas or a standpoint.