The Heritage of José Gaos and the Origins of the Philosophy of Liberation

Abstract

José Gaos' thought does not seem to provide a specific orientation regarding the ethical-political dimension. However, despite not being able to declare a direct affiliation, within the attention directed to the “context”, and its indissoluble link with philosophizing, it is possible to identify a link with the successive developments of a particular orientation of the philosophy of liberation. This article attempts to bring to light the possible “revealing” paths of this connection, trying to indicate the place of Gaosian thought in which this current or, rather, one of their souls is rooted. It will be possible, then, to recognize how in the “Gaosian inheritance” present in the thought of Leopoldo Zea, we can glimpse the orientation that Gaosian thought already moved in its Orteguian “circumstantial” inspiration. If it is the salvation of the circumstance, the basis of any cultural recovery, which leads to the same possibility of a Latin American philosophy, then a part of the philosophy of liberation must be recognized as the fruit of a methodological attitude promoted by the exiled thinker.