Towards a decolonial rationality: Ethical-political-epistemological challenges to the modern worldview

Abstract

A review of modern epistemologies is a theoretical challenge for understanding the complex world. It is also an ethical and political challenge, as far as it will show the exclusion and silencing of the persons led to the dehumanization, whose knowledge and worldviews were for a long time discredited as legitimate explanations and guiding for their actions. In the text I merge the idea of Boaventura de Sousa Santos concerning the “prudent paradigm of a decent life” with the thesis of Latin American “modernity-coloniality-decoloniality”. Associating the diatopic hermeneutic of Santos with the pluritopic hermeneutic of Mignolo, I emphasize the urgency of a dialogue between the distinct cultural spheres, advocated by the South, as well as the urgency of decolonizing actions of the subalternities with an emphasis on particular experiences, on the translation and conjunction of differences around pluralistic projects of recognition of the subjects and their voices to expand the universal as diversality.