Philosopher
Ignacio Ellacuría
1930–1989
Spanish-born Salvadoran Jesuit whose philosophy of liberation, built on Xavier Zubiri’s metaphysics, called for a preferential option for the marginalised. Soldiers murdered him in 1989.
Ignacio Ellacuría was born in Spain in 1930, joined the Jesuits in 1947 and was soon sent to El Salvador, which became his home for the rest of his life. Trained in neo-scholasticism, he went on to study Ortega, Bergson, Heidegger and phenomenology, but his mature thought rests above all on Hegel, Marx and the Basque philosopher Xavier Zubiri, under whom he wrote a doctoral thesis of some 1,100 pages. For nearly twenty years he was Zubiri’s closest collaborator, returning to Spain each year to work with him.
In El Salvador he became president of the Jesuit University of Central America and a leading voice of Latin American liberation philosophy. In 1989, near the end of the country’s civil war, he was murdered by an elite, US-trained unit of the Salvadoran army, together with five fellow Jesuits, their housekeeper and her daughter.
Key ideas
- Philosophy as liberation
- To stay true to itself, philosophy must help us understand reality and our place in it, and in a world of dependency and injustice that makes it a philosophy of liberation.
- Historical reality
- Human reality is historical and social: the possibilities open to anyone are the accumulated result of past actions. In praxis, human action that transforms reality, people realise new possibilities for those who come after, so that praxis gradually frees freedom itself.
- The view from the margins
- What history has and has not delivered is seen most clearly from the standpoint of the marginalised, so a philosophy of history must take their side.
- Sentient intelligence
- With his teacher Zubiri he held that the West, since Parmenides, wrongly split sensing from understanding. In humans the two are one faculty, which grasps things as real, so we are always already in contact with reality.
- Tradition
- Western
- Region
- Spain and El Salvador
- Period
- Contemporary
Influences
Where these links come from
- Ignacio Ellacuría drew on G. W. F. Hegel. Source: David I. Gandolfo, Ignacio Ellacuría, Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
- Ignacio Ellacuría drew on Karl Marx. Source: David I. Gandolfo, Ignacio Ellacuría, Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Key works
- Philosophy of Historical Reality (Filosofía de la realidad histórica)
Sources
- David I. Gandolfo, Ignacio Ellacuría, Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy