In Ethics of Liberation, Enrique Dussel claims that American pragmatist philosophy “could not discover the phenomenon of Eurocentrism, because it interpreted the United States as the full Western fulfillment of Europe. . . . It did not take as its departure point the periphery, the dominated, the excluded, the poor, women, the races discriminated against.”1Decolonizing American Philosophy partially confirms, partially refutes, Dussel's charge. None of the contributors to this volume ever says quite so plainly, but its argument could be stated thus: that the idea of America at large in U.S. cultural discourse is predicated on the more or less forgetful repression of the majority of Americans, especially indigenous and Black, throughout the Americas, throughout the modern era, starting with Columbus's “discovery.” Thus, how many Americans think about America—American philosophy in an informal but still real sense—involves a “colonized and colonizing” metaphilosophy (4). To improve American philosophy,...

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