POVERTY AND LATIN AMERICAN PHILOSOPHY

This chapter lays out how poverty has been analyzed and debated within Latin American philosophy, especially since the 1960s, when a series of epistemic insubordinations took place within the social sciences and humanities at large sciences. It is noteworthy that Latin American philosophy has made “poverty” one of its key themes, in part because of the many contributions from disciplines ranging from pedagogy, sociology, economics, and literature to theology and philosophy. This chapter, however, focuses on the convergence of the contributions from political economy, that is, what have been called the “development of underdevelopment” theories: liberation theology, which gave us the famous hermeneutical key of “the preferential option for the poor” and the philosophy of liberation that translated that option for the “poor” into a philosopheme. To elucidate the cross-fertilization among political economy, liberation philosophy, and theology, the chapter focuses on three key thinkers: Andre Gunder Frank (political economist), Enrique Dussel (philosopher, historian, Marxologist), and Luis Razeto Migliaro (philosopher of economy), as a way to illustrate the ways in which Latin American thinkers have contribute to a deeper understanding of the polysemy of “poverty.”.