Andean Philosophy as a Questioning Alterity: An Intercultural Criticism of Western Andro- and Ethnocentrism

This article aims to provide a more concrete discussion of the intercultural approach based on previously worked out and established parameters in the field. Enough preliminary work has been done on the broad lines of interculturality in general and on those of intercultural philosophy in particular. I will therefore focus on the more tangible aspects of the general views of intercultural philosophy, which I will not make explicit here, nor should I, since this has already been done over the past fifteen years or so. In spite of this long-standing research into the subject, the intercultural approach still has not been adopted by the international academic community as a whole, but only in a number of small niche areas. This can be explained in part from the power relations and overall inertia of the academic world but most of all from the continued predominance of a single model excluding any other viable approaches.

I am quite aware of the purpose of this article. It does not by any means intend to balance or harmonise varying paradigms, nor make an exhaustive or balanced assessment of the Western tradition. It is paradigmatic in the sense that it discusses several prevailing features of the dominant Western tradition. Inevitably, it makes heterodox and less obvious characteristics of this tradition explicit. The examples on ethnocentricity and androcentricity are given solely to enlighten the reader, not to qualify all Western tradition as androcentric and ethnocentric. On the other hand, as its title suggests, it would be beyond the scope of this article to include any intercul-tural criticism of Andean philosophy. It rather invites such criticism from others in other – not necessarily Western – philosophical traditions.