Eurocentrism and Modernity (Introduction to the Frankfurt Lectures)

Bibliographic Data

ID5778886
AuthorsEnrique Dussel (corresponding author)
Year1993
Volume20
Issue3
Pages65-65
Publication date1993-01-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
Venueboundary 2 (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0190-3659 • E-ISSN: 1527-2141
PublisherJSTOR (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.2307/303341
OpenAlexW2332904369
LanguageEN
Citations received198

Modernity is, for many (for Jurgen Habermas or Charles Taylor, for example), an essentially or exclusively European phenomenon. In these lectures, I will argue that modernity is, in fact, a European phenomenon, but one constituted in a dialectical relation with a non-European alterity that is its ultimate content. Modernity appears when Europe affirms itself as the of a World History that it inaugurates; the that surrounds this center is consequently part of its self-definition. The occlusion of this periphery (and of the role of Spain and Portugal in the formation of the modern world system from the late fifteenth to the mid-seventeenth centuries) leads the major contemporary thinkers of the into a Eurocentric fallacy in their understanding of modernity. If their understanding of the genealogy of modernity is thus partial and provincial, their attempts at a critique or defense of it are likewise unilateral and, in part, false

Aesthetics · Art history · Epistemology · Eurocentrism · Modernity · Sociology · Anthropology · Critical Theory and Philosophy · History · Philosophy · Political Economy and Marxism

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