From Ego Conquiro to Ego Cogito: Dussel’s Latin American History of Philosophy

Modern Western philosophy has long excluded Latin America from its historical and conceptual narrative, reinforcing a Eurocentric understanding of historical development. This study aims to challenge that exclusion by analyzing how Enrique Dussel’s philosophy - especially as developed in 1492: El encubrimiento del Otro and Meditaciones anticartesianas - reconstructs the origins of modern subjectivity from a Latin American, decolonial perspective. Through textual analysis of Dussel’s works and comparative readings of canonical European thinkers such as Hegel and Descartes, this research investigates the historical and ontological link between the ego cogito and the ego conquiro . Following a philosophical and critical-historical method, the study combines close exegesis with genealogical reconstruction to identify how the myth of modernity emerged through colonial conquest and philosophical erasure. The results reveal that, according to Dussel, the Cartesian subject - the foundation of modern philosophy - is only made possible through the prior conquest and objectification of the colonial Other. This encounter is not peripheral but constitutive: Latin America and the broader colonial world played a crucial role in the birth of modernity, both economically and philosophically, and ontologically. As highlighted in its conclusions, this study represents only an initial step: a deconstructive phase within the broader tradition of the Philosophy of Liberation. The study calls for the reconstruction of a philosophical canon that acknowledges its colonial foundations and includes the voices it has historically silenced. Ultimately, it argues that decolonizing philosophy, a process that broadly extends from Latin America to the entire peripheral world, is not only possible but also necessary for a more just and inclusive global thought.