The Global South in Contemporary Comparative Philosophy

The Portuguese sociologist Boaventura de Sousa Santos, long based at the University of Coimbra and the University of Wisconsin–Madison, developed one of the most influential recent theorizations of global epistemic inequality in Epistemologies of the South: Justice against Epistemicide (Routledge, 2014). Santos introduces the concept of "abyssal thinking" to describe what he takes to be a foundational, largely invisible line running through modern Western thought since the colonial era, a line that divides the sphere of legitimate, debatable knowledge — science, philosophy, law, as practiced and validated within the "metropolitan" West — from a vast sphere of colonial "non-knowledge," beliefs and practices treated as beneath even the threshold of falsity or error, simply outside the field of what counts as knowledge at all.