A filosofia à venda, a douta ignorância e a aposta de Pascal

• Main Author: Boaventura de Sousa Santos
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Centro de Estudos Sociais da Universidade de Coimbra 2008-03-01
• Series: Revista Crítica de Ciências Sociais
• Subjects: North-South relations; epistemology; alternative knowledge; sociology of absences; sociology of emergences; lazy reason
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/rccs/691
• ISSN: 0254-1106; 2182-7435

The ‘epistemology of the South’ which I have been proposing aims at recovering the knowledge and practices of social groups which, through the workings of capitalism and colonialism, were historically and sociologically placed in a position wherein they were the mere object or natural resource of dominant knowledge, viewed as the only valid form. The central concepts of the epistemology of the South are the sociology of absences, the sociology of emergence, the ecology of knowledge, and intercultural translation. In actual fact, this is not an epistemology, but rather a set of epistemologies. Unlike the epistemologies of the North, the epistemologies of the South seek to include the greatest number of experiences of the types of knowledge of the world. Thus, after undergoing reconfiguration, they embrace the North’s experience of knowledge. Unsuspected bridges of intercommunication open up, namely across to Western traditions which were marginalised, discredited or forgotten by that which in the nineteenth century came to be the prevailing canon of modern science.