Preliminary Words to the First Issue

The term “intercultural philosophy” may sound anachronistic, belonging to the debates on political multi- and interculturalism that took place in the second half of the twentieth century rather than to our current situation, be that what it may. Quite probably, impression is at least partly accurate. The term became popular within a certain German-speaking context, with philosophers such as Franz Martin Wimmer, Ram Adhar Mall, and the students of Heinrich Rombach. It also resonated in Latin America through Raúl Betancourt, who was likewise trained in Germany. This expansion, moreover, often took place under the auspices of Catholic organizations such as Missio and Icala. Although this particular genealogy cannot be ignored, our journal does not seek to align itself with a single tradition. Rather, our aim is to critically —we might even say strategically— re-appropriate the term “intercultural philosophy” to provide a space that remains underdeveloped and largely unavailable within academia. Despite the growing international interest in non-European philosophies, “culturalized” (or “exoticized”) philosophies continue to be marginalized by predominant academic currents: proof of this is that, while specialists in, say, Ōmori Shōzō or Gamaliel Churata are taken to be doing, respectively, Japanese philosophy and Latin American Philosophy, those working in the more established academic traditions are taken to be doing philosophy tout court. In this sense, our goal is not merely to offer a “space for dialogue.” While dialogue is indeed a fundamental element of intercultural philosophy, it would be a mistake to reduce the purpose of intercultural philosophy to a kind of diplomatic function connecting different “philosophies.” On the contrary, what interests us is to recover the critical and creative potential of the world’s “culturalized” philosophies, to rediscover their capacity to make us doubt our entrenched assumptions, challenge the methodologies we take for granted, and force us to become conscious that, no matter what we do or what we aim at, we all engage in philosophical practices while standing somewhere. Hence, our desire that intercultural philosophy be engaged in as a “bottom-up” practice, that is, not as starting from a given cultural whole, but from local ways of thinking. We expect to publish a small number of peer-reviewed articles annually, along with essays, interviews, and book reviews that seek to engage with the current situation of post-Eurocentric philosophies.