Leopoldo Zea Aguilar

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Leopoldo Zea Aguilar ---- (more info)

Translation Status: Stage 2 : In Progress (How-to)
Comment: Normally known as "Leopoldo Zea".
Requested by: VSerrata 08:44, 12 March 2007 (UTC)
Interest of the translation: Award-winning Mexican philosopher who led internationally in Latin American liberation philosophy. Redlined in the article on Ignacio Ellacuría.
Translator(s): Ali310
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Leopoldo Zea (Born Leopoldo Zea Aguilar, Mexico City, June 30th, 1912 - June 8th, 2004) was a Mexican philosopher.

One of the integral Latin Americanism thinkers in history, he became famous thanks to the grade thesis El Positivismo en México (The Positivism in Mexico - 1943), with which he applied and studied the positivism in the context of his country and in the world, during the transition of the 19th and 20th centuries. With it he began the defense of the American Integration, recommended by the Liberator and Statesman Simón Bolívar, giving him a true meaning based on the neocolonialism during the depression of the American Empire.

In his approach, he showed that the historic facts aren't independent to ideas, and in the same way ~~no se manifiesta en lo abstracto sino a una simple reacción a una determinada situación de la vida humana y popular~~.

In his idea of a united Latin America, he defended the belief on the place of the man in the region, clarifying that the disovery of 1492 was nothing more than a concealment; in cultural and known terms, a product of the ideologic cross-breeding for the configuration of the Latin American identity, a matter which he revealed on the 5th centenary in 1992. Later, he studied the ontologic analysis of Latin America in the cultural and geohistoric planes.

Of poor origin, he started working in 1933 in the National Telegraph office, to afford the costs of his Secondary and University education.

He was a member of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (NAUM) since his training as Professor and Philosopher in 1943. In 1954, he was appointed to a full-time position as researcher in the Philosophic Studies Center of the University. In 1947 he founded the Faculty of Philosophy and gave lectures on History of ideas in America. In 1966 he became Director of the Faculty, maintaining this position until 1970. During his time as Director he founded the Latin American Studies College (in 1966) and later on founded the Coordination and Propagation Centre of the NAUM Latin American Studies (1978). He received multiple awards like the Premio Nacional de Ciencias y Artes in 1980, the Premio Interamericano de Cultura "Gabriela Mistral" (of the OEA) and the Medalla Belisario Domínguez (of the Senate of Mexico) in 2000, three years after he was catalogued and honoured by the NAUM as the oldest professor that continued working without interruptions until his death.

He was compared to many political and revolutionary personalities of the intellectual world, such as Germán Arciniegas (who was his friend), Che Guevara, José Gaos (his mentor), Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre, Andrés Bello, Simón Bolívar, Domingo Faustino Sarmiento and others.

His philosophy marked his concept of a united Latin America, not in the utopia, but in reality, the fight and renovation of a town in so much demand of such a change to take place, that he opened up the post to other future graduates of the subject.