There are moments in history when the conceptual scaffolding of a civilization—its taken-for-granted truths, its invisible metaphors, its normative furniture—begins to crack under its own weight. The present moment, in the early decades of the twenty-first century, is such a moment. For nearly three centuries, the world has lived under a gravitational field shaped by a particular constellation of ideas born in Europe: the sovereign individual, linear progress, rational mastery, rights-based morality, the secular state, the autonomous subject of Enlightenment humanism. These commitments organised the modern world; they underwrote the sciences, the social contract, the very vocabulary of development, democracy, education, and ethics. They promised a horizon of universality—one world, one rationality, one humanity, one destiny.
But the monolith is fissuring. Most of humanity never lived comfortably inside the metaphysical house built in Europe’s image. And many in the West no longer do. Climate collapse, inequality, cultural exhaustion, and a pervasive sense of spiritual depletion have converged to expose the limits of a worldview premised on domination over interdependence, abstraction over embeddedness, and linearity over cyclicality. The universal subject of modernity—rational, self-possessed, disembedded, sovereign—was always, as decolonial thinkers warn, a provincial figure masquerading as a global template.
This essay is an attempt to imagine otherwise. It seeks neither a rejection of the West nor a replacement of one hegemonic worldview with another. Instead, it sets its sights on a more ambitious horizon: a vision of humanism that is fundamentally pluriversal—an ethic and metaphysics capacious enough to let many worlds, many subjectivities, many temporalities, many moral grammars coexist without being collapsed into uniformity. If modern universalism was a monologue pretending to be a conversation, pluriversal humanism aspires to be a conversation that knows it can never be a monologue.
To re-imagine humanism, we must begin at its foundations: the deep metaphysical assumptions that shape how civilizations understand time, selfhood, and causality. These are not abstract philosophical categories but living coordinates that structure everyday sense-making, moral reasoning, agency, responsibility, and identity. A universalism built on a singular conception of these categories was destined to be fragile. A global civilization capable of surviving the planetary challenges ahead must instead be constructed upon the recognition that humanity inhabits many metaphysical worlds at once.
Time, for the modern West, is an arrow: linear, progressive, moving from a primitive past toward a more rational future. This temporal metaphysics emerged from Christian eschatology, was secularized by Enlightenment philosophy, and has since been naturalized into development theory, psychology, economics, and political ideology. It is this sense of time that underpins the idea of progress, the obsession with novelty, the valorisation of youth, and the belief that history’s arc bends toward a singular destination. But this arrow of time is not the world’s only temporal imagination—far from it.
Dharmic civilizations long viewed time as cyclical: vast cosmic cycles of arising and dissolution, nested cycles of moral decay and renewal, and intimate cycles of birth, death, and rebirth. Indigenous peoples across the Americas understood time as spiral rather than linear, each turn of the spiral renewing but never repeating the past. African temporalities often emphasise the event rather than the abstract chronological pulse—time moves with social rhythms, not mechanical clocks. Chinese cosmology sees time as seasonal, patterned but unending, guided by the harmony of yin and yang. Aboriginal Australian cultures hold a concept of ancestral time that is not past but ever-present, a continuous unfolding of Dreaming in which the past animates the now.
Even within Western critical traditions, the hegemony of linear time has been challenged: Bergson’s durée, Heidegger’s temporality of being, Benjamin’s “now-time,” and Derrida’s spectral time all show that the arrow was never the only story even in its home territory.
And what of Humberto Maturana, who argues that time is not an external property of the world but a coordinative operation of living systems? His insight—that time is enacted rather than discovered—beautifully converges with Buddhist momentariness, where time is a sequence of arising and passing mental events, and with Indigenous propositions that time is a relation rather than a container. Maturana does not distract us; he gives us a bridge between cognitive biology and the philosophical traditions that long knew that time is a modality of life, not a cosmic ruler.
If one begins from the premise that humanity lives in a pluriverse of times—not one temporal ontology but many—then the search for a universal developmental trajectory or a single “modernity” appears not only naïve but violent in its erasures.
Equally diverse are the world’s ideas of the self. The Western Enlightenment bequeathed the autonomous individual: self-contained, self-determining, defined by boundaries rather than relationships. This subject stands outside the world, surveying it, analysing it, mastering it. Rights discourse presumes such a self; so do many forms of psychology and economics. But in much of the world, the self is not an island but a confluence of relationships.
Confucian civilization understands the self as inherently relational, constituted by roles—child, parent, friend, citizen—and enacted through ritual and ethical attunement. Ubuntu philosophy articulates a self that only becomes a self through others: “I am because we are.” In many African traditions, personhood is something one acquires through ethical participation in the community; not every human body is yet a “person.”
Indigenous cosmologies often conceive the self as distributed: part of land, ancestors, kin, spirits, animals—an ecology of being rather than an individual. Islamic thought conceives of the human as entrusted (amanah) with moral responsibility, a being whose freedom is inseparable from accountability to the divine and the community. Dharmic traditions offer multiple models: the layered self of Hindu thought, constituted by body, mind, intellect, and witnessing consciousness; the minimal-harm self of Jainism that seeks to reduce its footprint on all other lives; the non-self (anatta) of Buddhism, where the self is a conceptual convenience, not a metaphysical entity.
Psychology changes when the self changes. Responsibility, motivation, autonomy, flourishing—none of these mean the same thing across metaphysical grammars of personhood. A universal psychology that presumes one model of the self is not universal; it is local power masquerading as global truth.
Causality, too, is not singular. Modern Western thought prioritises linear causation: A produces B, B produces C. This model is powerful for engineering and scientific abstraction but poorly suited to moral, ecological, or cultural phenomena. Daoism teaches a different causality—non-force, indirect, reciprocal—where harmony emerges not from control but from attunement. Buddhist dependent origination sees all events as arising from interdependent conditions, with no single cause ever sufficient or necessary. African metaphysical systems often embrace complementary causality, where material, spiritual, and communal factors jointly produce outcomes. Indigenous relational causality understands events as mediated by a network of living and nonliving agents in reciprocal relationship.
Once we accept that metaphysics is multiple, then the political and moral architectures built upon them must also be plural. Modern universalism falters not because its ideals are wrong but because its metaphysical foundation is too narrow to sustain a genuinely global normative order.
What, then, might a pluriversal humanism look like? To answer, we must recognise that humanism itself is not a Western monopoly. It has many civilizational roots, most of them historically overshadowed by the coloniality of knowledge.
Dharmic humanism, for instance, is grounded in the idea that ethical life flows from dharma—relational responsibility, contextual discernment, and a commitment to non-harm. It is not rights-forward but responsibility-forward. It values self-cultivation, compassion, and long-horizon accountability through karmic consequence. Buddhist humanism offers an ethic of interdependence, impermanence, and compassion as a practical psychology. Jain humanism deepens non-violence into a radical empathy for all sentient beings.
Confucian humanism centres humane relationality (ren) and ritual propriety (li) as the basis of social harmony. It sees moral maturity not as asserting autonomy but as inhabiting relational integrity. Japanese humanism, influenced by both Shinto and Zen, values attentiveness, transience, and aesthetics as ethical dispositions.
African humanisms are richly plural: Ubuntu speaks of interconnectedness; Akan philosophy emphasises becoming a person through ethical action; Yoruba cosmology integrates spirituality, community, and individuality into a non-dual conception of flourishing. Time here is event-based; morality is reciprocal; knowledge is embodied.
Indigenous humanisms, across continents, share a recognition of kincentric ecology: the human is not separate from land, water, animals, ancestors, or future generations. Value flows from reciprocity, renewal, and balance. Their humanism is ecological, ancestral, intergenerational—a stark contrast to the presentism of global capitalism.
Islamic humanism, drawing from classical philosophy and contemporary scholarship, emphasizes the unity of creation, the dignity bestowed by fitra (primordial nature), and the ethical responsibility of stewardship. It sees the human as a moral trustee, not an owner of the world.
Latin American decolonial humanisms—such as Buen Vivir and the philosophies of liberation—centre community, relational well-being, and coexistence with Pachamama (Mother Earth). They critique linear development and propose alternatives grounded in reciprocity, dignity, and pluriversality.
These humanisms do not agree, but they resonate. Each offers fragments of insight unavailable to the others. Together, they expand the conceptual horizon of what it means to be human, ethical, free, responsible, and flourishing. They reveal a global archive of human dignity that modern universalism barely acknowledges.
To integrate these strands into a pluriversal psychology, we must abandon the search for universal laws that transcend culture. Instead, we must seek universal questions that invite multiple answers. How does a culture imagine a good life? What does it assume about agency? How does it conceptualise suffering, flourishing, time, responsibility, death, and community? A pluriversal psychology does not reject universality; it redeems it by grounding it in dialogue rather than domination.
Such a psychology would recognise that autonomy might express itself through interdependence rather than independence; responsibility might derive from communal belonging rather than contractual obligation; agency might be relational rather than individual; flourishing might include ecological reciprocity rather than personal achievement. These insights are not exotic; they are the lived experience of most of the world.
The implications for ethics, democracy, and development are profound.
Ethics, in a pluriversal frame, cannot be reduced to rights alone. Rights matter—but so do duties, compassion, reciprocity, relational accountability, and ecological responsibility. A world built purely on rights becomes adversarial; a world built purely on duties becomes oppressive. A pluriversal ethic seeks balance through moral polyphony.
Democracy, too, must be reimagined beyond the procedural model inherited from Western liberalism. Many societies have democratic traditions rooted in consensus, relational negotiation, elder councils, or moral cultivation. Confucian democracy prioritises virtue and harmony; Indigenous democracy emphasises consensus and restorative justice; Ubuntu governance centres relational repair; Dharmic traditions frame citizenship as an ethical duty rather than a personal entitlement. The goal is not to replace liberal democracy but to pluralise the family of democratic forms.
Development is perhaps the arena most distorted by modern universalism. The GDP-centric imagination sees all societies as standing on a single timeline of progress. But Buen Vivir, African communal development, Indigenous ecological reciprocity, Islamic stewardship, and Dharmic non-harm all challenge the very premise of linear economic evolution. What counts as prosperity? What counts as progress? What counts as a life worth living? A pluriversal development ethic must include ecological flourishing, cultural vitality, relational well-being, and spiritual depth—not merely income or consumption.
Ultimately, the goal is not to abandon universalism but to reconstruct it. A world without shared norms is ungovernable; a world with imposed norms is unlivable. The challenge is to imagine a universalism that is open, dialogical, and humble—one that arises from encounter rather than imposition. Such a universalism does not claim finality; it listens, absorbs, adapts. It is a process, not a doctrine.
Pluriversal humanism begins from ontological humility—the recognition that no civilization has a monopoly on truth—and moves to civilizational symmetry, where traditions meet as equals rather than as teacher and pupil. It requires an ethic of reciprocal intelligibility, where each worldview strives to understand the others on their own terms. It embraces moral polyphony, allowing multiple moral vocabularies to coexist without erasure. And it insists on ecological embeddedness, affirming that humanity cannot be imagined apart from the more-than-human world.
To live beyond the monolith is to accept that the world is not a single story but a library, and that humanism becomes richer when its shelves expand rather than contract. A pluriversal future does not reject the West; it situates it as one voice among many, no longer the conductor of the orchestra but an instrument in a global symphony of civilizational wisdom. Such a future is not guaranteed. It must be cultivated—in education, in political design, in cultural psychology, in global governance, in the shared work of imagining humanity not as a singular form but as a constellation.
If the last century taught us that universalism without plurality is oppressive, the present century may teach us that plurality without universal aspiration is untenable. The task ahead is to weave a universalism capable of breathing the air of many worlds—a humanism that honours difference without dissolving into relativism, a global ethic rooted in dignity, interdependence, and mutual flourishing. This is not a return to tradition nor a flight from modernity; it is an attempt to reassemble the world with a deeper understanding of its civilizational multiplicity.
We stand at the threshold of a world where no civilization can afford the arrogance of self-sufficiency. If humanity is to survive the planetary crises it has unleashed, it must learn to think in many languages, dream in many metaphysics, and build institutions capacious enough to hold plural moral worlds. This, perhaps, is the final promise of pluriversal humanism: not that everyone will agree, but that disagreement itself can be held within a larger ethic of shared existence—a world in which many worlds can coexist without fear, domination, or erasure. A world after universalism, yet still aspiring to the universal; a world of plurality, yet committed to common dignity; a world that is finally ready to acknowledge that human wisdom is vast, civilizational, and irreducibly diverse.
Such a world, if we choose to build it, might be the first truly global civilization humanity has ever known.
ANNEXURE: SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
Indigenous Philosophy & African Philosophy & Humanism
Wiredu, Kwasi. Cultural Universals and Particulars.
Ramose, Mogobe. African Philosophy Through Ubuntu.
Gyekye, Kwame. An Essay on African Philosophical Thought.
Mbiti, John. African Religions and Philosophy.
Postcolonial Theory
Said, Edward. Orientalism.
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. A Critique of Postcolonial Reason.
Bhabha, Homi. The Location of Culture.
Chatterjee, Partha. The Nation and Its Fragments.
Decolonial Thinkers
Mignolo, Walter. The Darker Side of Western Modernity.
Quijano, Aníbal. “Coloniality of Power.”
Dussel, Enrique. Philosophy of Liberation.
Maldonado-Torres, Nelson. On the Coloniality of Being.
Escobar, Arturo. Designs for the PluriverseAnthropology
Kimmerer, Robin Wall. Braiding Sweetgrass.
Simpson, Leanne. As We Have Always Done.
Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo. Cannibal Metaphysics.
Deloria, Vine Jr. God Is Red.
Battiste, Marie. Decolonizing Education.
Latin American Thought
Gudynas, Eduardo. “Buen Vivir: Today’s Tomorrow.”
de la Cadena, Marisol. Earth Beings.
Zapatista Communiqués (Subcomandante Marcos).
Dharmic Philosophies
Radhakrishnan, S. Indian Philosophy.
Bhikkhu Bodhi. The Noble Eightfold Path.
Jaini, Padmanabh. The Jaina Path of Purification.
Dasgupta, Surendranath. A History of Indian Philosophy.
Confucian, Daoist, East Asian Philosophies
Tu Weiming. Centrality and Commonality.
Ames, Roger & Hall, David. Thinking Through Confucius.
Liu, Xiaogan. Classifying the Zhuangzi.
Masao Abe. Zen and Western Thought.
Islamic Philosophy & Humanism
Seyyed Hossein Nasr. Islamic Life and Thought.
Al-Farabi. The Virtuous City.
Ziauddin Sardar. Reading the Qur’an.
Abou El Fadl, Khaled. The Search for Beauty in Islam.
Anthropologies of Time & Self
Evans-Pritchard, E.E. The Nuer.
Bloch, Maurice. From Blessing to Violence.
Fabian, Johannes. Time and the Other.
Gell, Alfred. The Anthropology of Time.
Geertz, Clifford. The Interpretation of Cultures.
Systems Theory & Cognitive Biology
Maturana, Humberto & Varela, Francisco. The Tree of Knowledge.
Bateson, Gregory. Steps to an Ecology of Mind.
Cultural & Critical Psychology
Shweder, Richard. Thinking Through Cultures.
Mark Freeman. Rewriting the Self.
Markus, Hazel & Kitayama, Shinobu. “Culture and the Self.”
Western Critical & Philosophical Thought
Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations.
Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time.
Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology.
MacIntyre, Alasdair. After Virtue.
Taylor, Charles. Sources of the Self.
ANNOTATED Readings
What We Remember to Forget and Forget to Remember
Meaning and memory - A Reading List for Humanism in Today’s Context
Humanism is often presented as a proud story we remember: Renaissance art, Enlightenment reason, the rights-bearing individual, secular progress. But there’s also a quieter story running underneath it—of what we learned to forget and what we forgot we knew. This reading list is built around those absences. It gathers voices and traditions that have shaped human dignity and meaning for centuries, yet rarely show up when “humanism” is learned in its standard, Western script.
The first cluster, on African and Indigenous philosophies (Wiredu, Ramose, Gyekye, Mbiti, Kimmerer, Simpson, Viveiros de Castro, Deloria, Battiste), brings back ways of thinking in which personhood is inherently relational, community is constitutive, and land and nonhuman beings belong inside the moral circle. These are traditions modernity often taught us to treat as folklore or “culture,” not as philosophy. Reading them is a way of remembering that our most basic ideas of self, reason, and responsibility could have been otherwise—and still can be.
Postcolonial and decolonial thinkers (Said, Spivak, Bhabha, Chatterjee, Mignolo, Quijano, Dussel, Maldonado-Torres, Escobar), along with Latin American work on Buen Vivir and the Zapatistas, show how the “universal human” was built alongside empire, race, and extraction. They help us notice what modern humanism conveniently forgot: which lives were left out of its concern, which knowledges were downgraded, and which futures were made impossible. They also point toward a different kind of universality, one that starts from many worlds rather than one.
Dharmic, Confucian, East Asian, and Islamic texts (Radhakrishnan, Bhikkhu Bodhi, Jaini, Dasgupta, Tu Weiming, Ames & Hall, Liu, Masao Abe, Nasr, Al-Farabi, Sardar, Abou El Fadl) reintroduce ethical and spiritual lineages that have quietly sustained billions of people. Here we encounter ideas of non-violence, interdependence, self-cultivation, harmony, beauty, and stewardship that mainstream humanism often side-lined as “religion” or “tradition.” These works remind us that humanism doesn’t have to choose between depth and critique, or between transcendence and justice.
Anthropologists, systems theorists, and cultural psychologists (Evans-Pritchard, Bloch, Fabian, Gell, Geertz, Maturana & Varela, Bateson, Shweder, Freeman, Markus & Kitayama) show how even our most taken-for-granted categories—time, self, mind, progress—are learned habits of attention. They help us see how much our own training has taught us not to see, and how expanding humanism requires expanding our picture of what humans are actually like: embodied, cultural, ecological, and world-making.
Finally, the Western critical philosophers (Benjamin, Heidegger, Derrida, MacIntyre, Taylor) are here not as the unquestioned centre but as one important strand in a larger weave. They turn Western humanism back on itself, asking how its concepts of history, subjectivity, morality, and authenticity were constructed, and what they concealed. Read alongside the other clusters, they help us remember that even the dominant story was always more fragile and more contested than it looked.
You don’t have to tackle everything at once. A useful way to begin is to let the forgettings talk to one another: pair an Indigenous or African text with a decolonial one, a Dharmic or Confucian reading with a Western critical work, an anthropology piece with a cultural-psychology article. The detailed notes that follow this introduction will help you choose your starting points. Taken together, these works invite you to rethink humanism as a practice of remembering differently—bringing back what was pushed to the margins, and holding the human as a shared, unfinished question rather than a finished Western answer.
Indigenous Philosophy & African Philosophy & Humanism
Kwasi Wiredu – Cultural Universals and Particulars
Wiredu examines the tension between cultural particularity and claims to universality, arguing that some conceptual and moral universals can be grounded in our shared human biology and basic forms of reasoning. Against both uncritical relativism and Eurocentric universalism, he proposes “conceptual decolonization”: critically reworking inherited categories through African languages and lifeworlds. Using Akan thought as a key interlocutor, he shows how African philosophy can contribute to global debates on truth, democracy, and human rights without surrendering its own distinctive perspectives.
Mogobe Ramose – African Philosophy Through Ubuntu
Ramose places ubuntu at the centre of African philosophy, presenting it as both an ontology (being is fundamentally relational) and an ethic (justice and law are about restoring equilibrium among interconnected persons). He argues that post-colonial Africa cannot be genuinely liberated while its concepts of reality, knowledge, and law remain captive to European epistemologies. By rereading questions of land, justice, and reconciliation through ubuntu, Ramose shows how African traditions can critique and transform modern legal and political orders rather than simply imitate them.
Kwame Gyekye – An Essay on African Philosophical Thought: The Akan Conceptual Scheme
Gyekye develops a systematic account of Akan concepts of personhood, destiny, community, and morality to argue that African philosophy must arise from critical reflection on African thought, not merely from Africans writing about abstract philosophy. He rejects both romanticised traditionalism and the wholesale import of Western categories, proposing instead a philosophically disciplined engagement with proverbs, beliefs, and practices. This work is often read alongside his later writings as articulating a “moderate communitarianism,” which affirms communal bonds while recognising individual rights and agency.
John S. Mbiti – African Religions and Philosophy
Mbiti offers a pioneering, continent-wide overview of African religious worldviews, emphasising how belief in God, ancestors, spirits, and communal rites pervades everyday life. He famously characterises African notions of time as oriented primarily to the present and the immediate past, with a more attenuated future—an analysis that sparked much later debate and refinement. The book insists that African religions are coherent, organised systems deserving serious theological and philosophical engagement, and it helped establish African traditional religions as a legitimate field of academic study.
Postcolonial Theory
Edward Said – Orientalism
Said shows how Western scholarship, literature, and policy have produced “the Orient” as an exotic, backward, and inferior Other, in a discourse that supports colonial and geopolitical domination. “Orientalism” names both an academic field and a wider style of thought that splits East and West into essentialised blocs, granting the West authority to define and manage the East. By demonstrating how knowledge and power are entwined, Said’s book reshaped literary studies, history, and the social sciences, and became foundational for postcolonial theory.
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak – A Critique of Postcolonial Reason
Spivak tracks the figure of the “native informant” through philosophy, literature, and history to show how Western and sometimes postcolonial discourses alike render the subaltern mute. She interrogates canonical thinkers from Kant and Hegel to Marx and Derrida, as well as nationalist and feminist movements, to reveal the exclusions built into their claims to universality or emancipation. The book is both a critique of postcolonial theory’s blind spots and a call for an ethically responsible, self-reflexive practice of criticism that remains alert to complicity and silencing.
Homi K. Bhabha – The Location of Culture
Bhabha argues that colonial and postcolonial identities are formed in “in-between” or Third spaces, where mimicry, ambivalence, and hybridity unsettle fixed binaries of coloniser and colonised. Through readings of Fanon, literature, and visual culture, he shows how cultural meaning is negotiated under asymmetric power and how subaltern agency often appears in the cracks of colonial discourse rather than in pure opposition. His concepts of hybridity and the Third Space have become central—but also contested—tools for thinking about culture, translation, and difference.
Partha Chatterjee – The Nation and Its Fragments
Chatterjee examines anticolonial nationalisms in Asia and Africa, especially India, to argue that they created an inner domain of cultural and spiritual life claimed as uniquely their own, distinct from an outer domain of political and economic structures patterned on the West. This division allowed elites to appropriate aspects of Western modernity while asserting cultural sovereignty at home, with complex consequences for gender, class, and subaltern groups. The book challenges Eurocentric theories of nationalism by showing how colonial contexts generated alternative logics of nation-making.
Decolonial Thinkers
Walter D. Mignolo – The Darker Side of Western Modernity
Mignolo argues that modernity cannot be separated from coloniality: the global expansion of European power produced a “colonial matrix of power” whose epistemic and material effects continue into the present. The book critiques Western claims to universality and progress, while proposing “border thinking” and “decolonial options” as ways of knowing and being otherwise. Mignolo frames pluriversality—not one world but a world of many worlds—as the horizon for decolonial projects in politics, economics, and culture.
Aníbal Quijano – “Coloniality of Power”
Quijano’s influential essay introduces “coloniality of power” to describe how racialised hierarchies, labour control, and Eurocentric knowledge regimes established during colonialism persist in contemporary capitalism and global governance. He argues that modernity itself emerged through Europe’s domination of the Americas, generating enduring patterns of social classification and epistemic privilege. The concept has become a cornerstone of decolonial theory, linking race, knowledge, and political economy in a single analytic framework.
Enrique Dussel – Philosophy of Liberation
Dussel develops a philosophical project rooted in the historical experience of Latin America and other “peripheral” regions, beginning ethics from the perspective of the oppressed rather than from abstract universals. He criticises Eurocentric philosophy for ignoring the victims of colonialism and capitalism, and proposes a “philosophy of liberation” that centres their voices and struggles. Drawing on Marx, Levinas, and Christian thought, Dussel rethinks history, economics, and morality from the “underside” of modernity.
Nelson Maldonado-Torres – On the Coloniality of Being
Maldonado-Torres extends decolonial analysis beyond power and knowledge to examine how colonialism reshapes the very category of being, producing subjects who are treated as less than fully human. Building on Quijano and engaging phenomenology and Fanon, he theorises “coloniality of being” as the lived, existential dimension of coloniality, marked by experiences of dehumanisation, terror, and denial of reciprocity. His work underscores that decolonisation must involve transforming ontologies and subjectivities, not only institutions and discourses.
Arturo Escobar – Designs for the Pluriverse
Escobar brings decolonial thought into conversation with design and development, arguing that dominant design practices reproduce capitalist, Eurocentric notions of progress. He proposes “autonomous design” grounded in local ontologies, communal autonomy, and radical interdependence, highlighting Latin American Indigenous and Afro-descendant movements as exemplars. The book envisions design as a tool for sustaining a pluriverse of worlds rather than converging them into a single global modernity.
Anthropology / Indigenous & Decolonial Studies
Robin Wall Kimmerer – Braiding Sweetgrass
Kimmerer, a Potawatomi botanist, interweaves Indigenous stories, scientific ecology, and memoir to propose a relational ethic of reciprocity with the more-than-human world. She portrays plants and ecosystems as kin and teachers, arguing for a “gift economy” in which humans respond to the Earth’s generosity with gratitude, restraint, and care. The book challenges extractive, utilitarian attitudes to nature and has become a touchstone for Indigenous and ecological humanisms.
Leanne Betasamosake Simpson – As We Have Always Done
Simpson articulates an Anishinaabe vision of Indigenous freedom as grounded in everyday practices of land-based life, care, and “grounded normativity,” rather than in state recognition or rights-based frameworks. She describes “radical resurgence” as living Indigenous political and ethical traditions now, through refusal of settler colonial demands and regeneration of Indigenous governance, gender relations, and knowledge. The book combines theory, story, and poetry, and is widely cited in discussions of Indigenous resurgence.
Eduardo Viveiros de Castro – Cannibal Metaphysics
Viveiros de Castro elaborates “Amerindian perspectivism,” the idea that many Amazonian peoples see humans, animals, and spirits as sharing a common culture but occupying different bodies and perspectives. From this he derives the notion of “multinaturalism,” which inverts Western multiculturalism by positing one culture and many natures. The book argues that Amazonian cosmologies should be treated as serious metaphysical interlocutors, and it positions anthropology as a practice of “permanent decolonisation of thought.”
Vine Deloria Jr. – God Is Red
Deloria contrasts Native American, land-based spiritualities with Christianity’s historically time-centred, history-and-salvation orientation. He argues that Indigenous religions root the sacred in particular places and relationships, offering more sustainable and just ways of relating to land and community than the anthropocentric, universalising tendencies of Western theology. The book is also a sharp political critique, linking Christian and American narratives of progress to colonisation and ecological crisis.
Marie Battiste – Decolonizing Education: Nourishing the Learning Spirit
Battiste analyses how Eurocentric education systems have damaged Indigenous languages, knowledges, and identities, documenting the legacies of forced assimilation and systemic racism in schooling. Drawing on treaties, international law, and Indigenous scholarship, she argues for recognising Indigenous epistemologies as rights-bearing and for fundamentally rethinking curricula and pedagogy. Her vision of “nourishing the learning spirit” calls for trans-systemic reconciliation between Indigenous and Western knowledge traditions rather than token inclusion.
Latin American Thought
Eduardo Gudynas – “Buen Vivir: Today’s Tomorrow”
Gudynas explains Buen Vivir (Sumak Kawsay) as an Andean-rooted notion of “living well” that prioritises collective well-being, ecological balance, and cultural diversity over growth-driven development. He situates it in contemporary constitutional experiments in Ecuador and Bolivia and contrasts it with conventional development models based on extractivism and individual consumption. The essay frames Buen Vivir as both a critique of and a proposal beyond mainstream development theory.
Marisol de la Cadena – Earth Beings
Through a long-term collaboration with a Quechua ritual specialist and his community, de la Cadena explores how Andean “earth beings” (such as mountains) participate in politics as both geological and sentient entities. She argues that such beings exceed modern nature/culture and subject/object divisions, making encounters between state and Indigenous actors into encounters between different worlds. The book exemplifies an “ontological” approach to politics, where the task is not only representing interests but mediating between distinct realities.
Zapatista Communiqués (Subcomandante Marcos)
The Zapatista communiqués from Chiapas blend political analysis, Indigenous storytelling, and poetic allegory to articulate a critique of neoliberal globalisation and a vision of autonomy and dignity. They famously call for “a world where many worlds fit,” rejecting both assimilation into the Mexican state and vanguardist models of revolution. The texts function as political philosophy in narrative form, modelling forms of leadership, democracy, and global solidarity rooted in Indigenous practices and communal decision-making.
Dharmic Philosophies
S. Radhakrishnan – Indian Philosophy
Radhakrishnan’s two-volume work surveys major currents of Indian thought—from the Vedas and Upanishads through classical Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain schools—presenting them as sophisticated philosophical systems concerned with ultimate reality, self, and liberation. Writing for both Indian and Western audiences, he emphasises underlying spiritual unity amid doctrinal diversity, sometimes reading traditions through a modern, comparative lens. The work was instrumental in securing Indian philosophy a place in global academic philosophy in the mid-20th century.
Bhikkhu Bodhi – The Noble Eightfold Path
Bhikkhu Bodhi offers a concise yet detailed exposition of the Buddha’s Noble Eightfold Path, explaining each factor—right view, intention, speech, action, livelihood, effort, mindfulness, and concentration—and how they interrelate. Drawing on Pāli sources, he presents the path as an integrated training in ethical discipline, mental cultivation, and wisdom leading toward liberation from suffering. The book is widely used as a reliable, accessible guide to early Buddhist doctrine and practice.
Padmanabh Jaini – The Jaina Path of Purification
Jaini provides a comprehensive introduction to Jainism as a religious and philosophical tradition centred on non-violence, non-possessiveness, and strict ethical discipline. He explains doctrines of karma, the soul, cosmology, and the many-sidedness of truth (anekāntavāda), and shows how they structure both monastic and lay practices. The book is a standard scholarly reference, combining textual scholarship with attention to contemporary Jain life.
Surendranath Dasgupta – A History of Indian Philosophy
Dasgupta’s multi-volume history offers detailed, technical accounts of the main Indian philosophical systems—Nyāya, Vaiśeṣika, Sāṃkhya, Yoga, various Vedānta schools, Buddhist and Jain philosophies, and others. He reconstructs arguments in logic, metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics, often using Sanskrit sources in the original. Long before comparative philosophy was fashionable, this work demonstrated the depth and diversity of India’s philosophical heritage and remains a key reference.
Confucian, Daoist, East Asian Philosophies
Tu Weiming – Centrality and Commonality
Tu reinterprets Confucianism as a living, humanistic tradition relevant to modern pluralistic societies. He emphasises the “centrality” of self-cultivation and the “commonality” of shared humanity, presenting Confucianism as a relational vision of personhood grounded in ren (humaneness), li (ritual/propriety), and harmony with Heaven, Earth, and others. His work has been central to “New Confucian” efforts to articulate Confucian resources for democracy, ecology, and global ethics.
Roger T. Ames & David L. Hall – Thinking Through Confucius
Ames and Hall offer a philosophical reconstruction of Confucian thought using process-relational categories rather than substance metaphysics. They argue that Confucianism centres on role-constituted, relational persons whose identities are formed through ritual and responsive interaction, not through inner, self-contained essences. The book invites Western philosophers to rethink notions of self, language, and morality by “thinking through” Confucian texts and practices.
Liu Xiaogan – Classifying the Zhuangzi
Liu undertakes a philological and doctrinal analysis of the Zhuangzi, one of the main Daoist classics, distinguishing different layers and schools within the text. By tracing stylistic and thematic variations, he clarifies how diverse positions—such as relativistic scepticism, quietism, and primitivism—came to be woven together under the Zhuangzi’s name. His work helps readers and scholars navigate the text’s complexity and better appreciate its philosophical play with perspective and language.
Masao Abe – Zen and Western Thought
Abe brings Zen Buddhist ideas of emptiness, non-duality, and no-self into dialogue with Western philosophy and Christian theology. Engaging figures like Heidegger, Kierkegaard, and Tillich, he explores convergences and tensions between Zen insight and Western notions of God, selfhood, and truth. The volume models cross-cultural philosophy as mutual transformation rather than one-sided application, and has been influential in Buddhist-Christian dialogue and comparative philosophy.
Islamic Philosophy & Humanism
Seyyed Hossein Nasr – Islamic Life and Thought
Nasr’s essays present Islamic civilization as a unified spiritual and intellectual tradition, highlighting its philosophical, mystical, scientific, and artistic dimensions. He critiques modern secularism and technocracy from within Islamic metaphysics, arguing for a sacred view of nature and knowledge rooted in tawḥīd (divine unity). The volume shows how classical Islamic thought can speak to contemporary crises of meaning and ecology.
Al-Farabi – The Virtuous City
Al-Farabi’s political treatise, often compared to Plato’s Republic, describes an ideal city governed by a ruler who combines philosophical wisdom and prophetic inspiration. He relates the structure of the city to the hierarchy of the cosmos and the faculties of the soul, and classifies non-virtuous cities according to their characteristic deviations from the good. The work is a cornerstone of the Islamic falsafa tradition and a key text in medieval political philosophy.
Ziauddin Sardar – Reading the Qur’an
Sardar offers a contemporary, thematically organised reading of the Qur’an that emphasises its ethical principles, historical contexts, and relevance to modern issues such as pluralism, gender justice, and technology. He critiques narrow literalist interpretations and argues for an engaged, dynamic hermeneutic that keeps the Qur’an at the centre of Muslim life while acknowledging global modernity’s challenges. The book exemplifies an Islamic humanism critical of both Western dominance and Muslim authoritarianism.
Khaled Abou El Fadl – The Search for Beauty in Islam
Abou El Fadl’s essays argue that Islamic law and theology should be interpreted through an ethic of beauty, mercy, and moral responsibility, not reduced to rigid rules or authoritarian dictates. Drawing on jurisprudence, personal experience, and case analysis, he contends that interpreters are accountable before God and community for the justice and compassion of their readings. The book contributes to debates on Islam, rights, and pluralism by grounding them in a deeply humanistic understanding of the tradition.
Anthropologies of Time & Self
E.E. Evans-Pritchard – The Nuer
Evans-Pritchard’s classic ethnography of the Nuer of Sudan analyses their kinship, political organisation, and concepts of time and space. He shows that Nuer time is structured by ecological cycles and social events—cattle, seasons, rituals—rather than by abstract clock time, challenging assumptions about the universality of temporal experience. The book helped define social anthropology’s method of long-term fieldwork plus theoretical reflection.
Maurice Bloch – From Blessing to Violence
Bloch examines the circumcision rituals of the Merina of Madagascar, arguing that ritual can simultaneously celebrate community and reproduce political power and violence. He interprets ritual as creating a sense of timeless, transcendent authority that can override individual experience and dissent. The book combines detailed ethnography with a critical theory of symbolism and ideology, influencing later work on ritual, memory, and domination.
Johannes Fabian – Time and the Other
Fabian argues that anthropology has often denied “coevalness” to the people it studies by representing them as living in a time other than the anthropologist’s own—primitive, backward, or outside history. He shows how fieldwork, writing, and theoretical vocabularies can spatialise time in ways that mirror colonial hierarchies. The book became a seminal critique of ethnographic representation and a call for more reflexive, politically aware anthropology.
Alfred Gell – The Anthropology of Time
Gell surveys ethnographic and theoretical approaches to time, arguing against simplistic oppositions like “cyclical primitive time” versus “linear modern time.” He proposes that societies construct multiple practical timescapes related to technology, social organisation, and everyday tasks. The book helped consolidate time as a central anthropological theme and showed the great variety and complexity of temporal practices.
Clifford Geertz – The Interpretation of Cultures
Geertz’s influential collection of essays advances an interpretive approach to culture, defining it as “webs of significance” that people themselves have spun. Through “thick description” of practices like Balinese cockfighting and Moroccan bargaining, he shows how symbolic forms express and shape social life. The volume argues that anthropology’s task is to interpret meaning rather than discover laws, profoundly shaping the study of culture, self, and religion.
Systems Theory & Cognitive Biology
Humberto Maturana & Francisco Varela – The Tree of Knowledge
Maturana and Varela present an enactive account of cognition rooted in the biology of living systems. They argue that living beings are autopoietic—self-producing networks whose interactions generate their own domains of meaning—and that cognition is this ongoing embodied activity, not the representation of an independent world. The book traces implications for perception, language, and social systems, suggesting that what we call “reality” arises through our structural couplings with the environment.
Gregory Bateson – Steps to an Ecology of Mind
This collection of Bateson’s essays ranges across anthropology, psychiatry, cybernetics, and epistemology to argue that mind is not located solely in individual brains but distributed across systems of communication and relationship. He introduces ideas such as the “double bind” in schizophrenia, metalogues, and the “ecology of mind,” critiquing linear causality and narrow rationalism. The book laid important groundwork for systems thinking, family therapy, and ecological approaches to knowledge.
Cultural & Critical Psychology
Richard Shweder – Thinking Through Cultures
Shweder advances cultural psychology as a discipline that studies how persons and cultures “make each other up.” He critiques universalist assumptions in mainstream psychology and argues that mind is inseparable from local systems of meaning, morality, and practice. Through essays on India and elsewhere, he illustrates how emotions, moral judgments, and concepts of the self vary cross-culturally and calls for an interpretive, dialogical approach to psychological science.
Mark Freeman – Rewriting the Self
Freeman explores how people reinterpret their pasts and, in doing so, reshape their identities, arguing that the self is constituted narratively over time. Drawing on autobiographical texts (from Augustine to modern writers) and on psychology and philosophy, he examines memory, development, and moral growth as processes of “rewriting” the self. The book helped establish narrative psychology as a field and foregrounded the ethical and hermeneutic dimensions of self-understanding.
Hazel Markus & Shinobu Kitayama – “Culture and the Self: Implications for Cognition, Emotion, and Motivation”
Markus and Kitayama propose that different cultures foster different models of selfhood—“independent” in many Western contexts and “interdependent” in many East Asian and other contexts. They argue that these self-construals systematically shape cognition, emotion, and motivation, challenging the assumption that a Western-style autonomous self is universal. The article became one of the most cited in social psychology, launching extensive research and debate on culture and self.
Western Critical & Philosophical Thought
Walter Benjamin – Illuminations
This collection gathers key essays by Benjamin, including “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” and “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” He analyses how technological reproduction changes art’s “aura,” critiques historicism from the standpoint of the oppressed, and develops a messianic-materialist view of history focused on redeeming forgotten possibilities. The volume has been enormously influential in critical theory, media studies, and philosophy of history.
Martin Heidegger – Being and Time
Heidegger refocuses philosophy on the question of Being by analysing human existence (Dasein) as being-in-the-world, always already involved with others, things, and its own mortality. He links understanding, care, temporality, and authenticity in a phenomenological description of everyday life and its possibilities. The work deeply influenced existentialism, hermeneutics, and post-structuralism, even as Heidegger’s politics and terminology remain controversial.
Jacques Derrida – Of Grammatology
Derrida deconstructs the Western privileging of speech over writing, arguing that language and meaning are structured by différance—deferred and differentiated traces—so there is no pure, self-present origin of sense. Through readings of Rousseau and structuralist linguistics, he shows how metaphysical oppositions (speech/writing, presence/absence) depend on what they exclude. The book established deconstruction as a major critical approach in philosophy and literary theory.
Alasdair MacIntyre – After Virtue
MacIntyre argues that modern moral discourse is in disarray because it has lost the coherent frameworks of virtue ethics rooted in shared forms of life and narratives. He critiques Enlightenment attempts to justify morality independently of tradition and suggests returning to Aristotelian-inspired virtues embedded in practices, communities, and life stories. The book revitalised virtue ethics and fuelled communitarian critiques of liberal individualism.
Charles Taylor – Sources of the Self
Taylor traces the historical formation of modern Western identity, showing how ideas of inwardness, autonomy, authenticity, and moral sources evolved from classical, Christian, and Enlightenment traditions. He argues that contemporary secular humanism still depends on deep, often unacknowledged value commitments about dignity and the good. The book is a landmark in moral philosophy and intellectual history, illuminating how modern understandings of the self are historically contingent rather than timeless.
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