Key Insights from Juan José Bautista for Understanding Enrique Dussel

Juan José's reference to the native Andean peoples is the foundation for criticism of modern ontology. Bautista, like Marx and Dussel, always has as his foundation human life as a principle, a material anthropological starting point, a source of life, and the creator of ontological structures and culturally situated epistemologies. The philosopher is not only an epistemic subject; before that, he is a living, material body—a complex human being. Consequently, his work is not limited to an epistemological intention but also, ultimately, to transforming reality; in the case of liberation philosophers, this transformation involves the reality of the victims. For this, it is necessary to outline the construction of a categorical framework as part of the work of critical philosophical thinking. The manner in which this philosophical thought is expressed in the civilizations of Abya Yala, prior to 1492, is not in the Western way. The fact that the critical thinking of the original civilizations of Abya Yala has not been expressed in the philosophical narrative of the Western tradition does not imply that there was no philosophy of native liberation among our indigenous peoples prior to that time.