ECOLOGICAL MATERIALISM AND CRITICAL THEORY FROM THE AMERICAS THE SOCIAL PHILOSOPHIES OF ALFRED SCHMIDT AND ADOLFO SÁNCHEZ VÁZQUEZ

Abstract

In view of the current trend — still present, in one way or another, in the dominant philosophical discourse — to reduce the complex relationship between the ideal and the subjective, on the one hand, and the material and the objective-bodily, on the other, to something that can be fixed, repaired, improved, or even replaced by interventions of various kinds, whose only limit is the economic resources available at the moment and to the individual concerned, it is worth returning to the reflections of a Frankfurt School author who is utterly underestimated today in the global debate, and whose legacy has been overshadowed by the hallelujah shouts of the followers of other philosophical currents, whose manner of proceeding sometimes resembles that of insurance salesmen more than that of thinkers (critical ones, or at least serious). This author is Alfred Schmidt, whose central elements of a philosophical and critical materialism we aim to interpret in this article from a Latin American perspective, confronting them in some aspects with the Andalusian-Mexican philosopher Adolfo Sánchez Vázquez.