Eurocentrism and Decolonization in 20th-Century Philosophy

Catalog description

This course will introduce and critically assess the philosophical roots of Eurocentric and Colonial ideology as found in Edmund Husserl's phenomenological philosophy of history. In writings in the 1920's and 1930's, Husserl argued that the scientism and naturalism of Western culture threaten, paradoxically, to undermine the social value of objective truth and human meaning. His solution to this crisis is to renew and disseminate the Western/European conception of philosophy as the intuitive grasp of timeless, objective, and ideal truths, which is associated with a conception of universal human rationality stemming back to ancient Greece. Decolonial philosophers have argued that this picture hides a totalizing dynamic that erases particular difference. We will explore and critically assess some of these Decolonial critiques developed over the course of the 20th-Century. In particular, we will study the critiques of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and the overlooked Beninese philosopher and political activist Paulin Hountondji. We will also relate this debate in phenomenology to programs of Decolonial resistance in Feminist (Audre Lorde, Maria Lugones), Caribbean (Aime Césaire, Frantz Fanon), Native American (Standing Bear, Brian Burkhart), and Palestinian thought (Fayez Sayegh).