Dussel founded the Philosophy of Liberation movement, arguing that philosophy should begin not from the self-certain European subject but from the "exteriority" of those excluded by the dominant world system—the poor, the colonized, the Other. In "1492 - The Invention of the Americas" he relocated the origin of modernity to the conquest of the Americas rather than to the European Enlightenment, arguing modernity's self-image depends on concealing the colonized Other as its underside.
Intellectual setting
Dussel developed the Philosophy of Liberation in 1970s Argentina in dialogue with liberation theology and dependency theory, and after his exile his work fed into the broader decolonial turn in Latin American social theory associated with Aníbal Quijano and Walter Mignolo.
Key ideas
Philosophy from exteriority
Adapting and radicalizing Levinas's ethics of the Other into a geopolitical register, Dussel argued that ethical and philosophical reflection should begin from the standpoint of those excluded from the dominant "totality" of the world system, rather than treating European philosophy as a universal, neutral starting point.
The coloniality of modernity
Dussel argued that modernity did not originate in the eighteenth-century European Enlightenment alone but in 1492, when Europe constituted itself as center by conquering and concealing the Americas as its "underside," making colonial domination internal to, not incidental to, the modern world.
Legacy
Dussel is recognized as a founding figure of the Philosophy of Liberation and a major precursor of contemporary decolonial theory, and his critique of Eurocentric modernity continues to shape Latin American and global postcolonial philosophy.