Journal Article — Agenda for a South-South Philosophical Dialogue — by Enrique Dussel

The intercultural dialogue that has been developing since the beginning of the 21st century as a cultural and political priority should have an inter-philosophical global dialogue as its epistemological and ontological foundation. However, given the asymmetric relation between the Global North and the Global South, it is necessary that this global dialogue begin with an interphilosophical dialogue among the world’s post-colonial communities. This essay argues that it is imperative for philosophers of the South to come together to define and claim for themselves a philosophical practice—generating its topics and methods from its own historical, socioeconomic-political realities and traditions—that is critical of and goes beyond the European “I” which, by virtue of its colonial history, has asserted itself as the universal standard of humanity and philosophy. In asserting the particularity of their own traditions and the creative possibilities of their own situations, dialogues among the philosophers of the South work towards the realization of a pluriverse, where each culture will be in dialogue with all others from the perspective of a common “similarity,” enabling each to continuously recreate its own analogical “distinction,” and to diffuse itself within a dialogical, reciprocally creative space.