The Human “Historicity” as a Permanent Transition in the Philosophy of Ignacio Ellacuría

Abstract

Ignacio Ellacuría was brutally murdered in November the 16th, 1989 by the hands of El Salvador’s Armed Forces; ten years later in 1999, a quick but detailed “schema” of Xavier Zubiri’s anthropology, which he had used for a course he taught between July and August 1968 at the Centro de Estudios Superiores para el Desarrollo (CESDE) in Medellín, was published within the second volume which collected the Jesuit’s philosophical writings. The “schema” brings together many of those theses that form the basis of his most important work, and which came out posthumously, “Filosofía de la realidad histórica” (1990); this was developed in close comparison with the thought of the great Spanish philosopher whose Ellacuría was student and collaborator. The historiographical reconstruction of the salient passages of Ellacuría’s research on the relationship between historicity and history in the broader Zubiri anthropological context makes possible to highlight some peculiar aspects of the Jesuit’s thought, which is not merely limited to offer a new and different line of interpretation of Zubiri’s thought. The prominence of the idea of history as a transition within the social body, characteristic of the human experience, offers a new perspective, all internal to the Ibero-American philosophy of liberation, and at the same time, allows us to trace new and different sources in Ellacuría’s philosophical production.