The conservative turn in the work of Colombian philosopher Santiago Castro Gómez

Abstract

This paper will consist of a critque in response to the book El tonto y los canallas. Notas para un republicanismo transmoderno (2019) by Santiago Castro-Gómez aside from a series of objections to this last stage of the Colombian philosopher’s thought that can be considered as a kind of conservative turn in his work. It is shown that Castro-Gómez’s interpretation from modern epistemology (based on the subject-object separation) and rational politics (anthropocentric and cognitivist) does not allow him to address the ontological conflicts that in turn underlie the epistemological conflicts where the author wants to demonstrate political importance with his proposal of “republicanismo transmoderno”. It is argued that the author’s use of the Dusselian category of “transmodernity” is limited and even contradictory, as he finally ends up defending a sophisticated return to modern ways of doing politics based on the underestimation of the power of decolonial struggles of the social movements and ancestral peoples of América/ Abya Yala.