"Diversifying the Canon to Recover Humanity’s Past: The Case of Pre-colonial Andean": An Essay by Jorge Sanchez-Perez (Keywords: Erasure; Colonialism;Epistemic injustice;Indigenous Epistemologies)
From The Philosopher, vol. 114, no. 2 ("Autumn 2026")
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‘Avila needed the information for indoctrination and
to choose the way to extirpate idolatries.
Who and which were the gods of Huarochirí?
How were they worshipped? When and where?
Everything is spelled out in the manuscript.’
- José María Arguedas
Introduction to Dioses y Hombres de Huarochirí
A brief walk among some of the most prestigious universities in the world will allow anybody to see that demands to expand the philosophical canon beyond Western perspectives have become quite common. This demand – mostly led by students, I have to point out – has created two clear sides in the academic community. On the one hand, we have the large number of academic philosophers who claim to be on board with such an idea, on the other, we have the set of common suspects who claim that something cannot be properly conceived as philosophy unless it is somehow related to European men. For example, it was not too long ago that a reviewer suggested one of my papers be rejected because it made them uncomfortable to engage with philosophical work that does not exclude Indigenous views from philosophy from the beginning. This debate, of course, presupposes that the canon has been somehow limited and shaped by certain perspectives in what the former side might consider unfair ways, and what the latter side might consider consistent with philosophical traditions extending all the way back to Socrates. The presupposition that there might be an unfairness attached to this reality, as many can imagine, does not seem to be far off. Yet for all its rhetorical appeal, if demands to diversify the canon are meant to support real change, first they need some theoretical justification, and second, some awareness of the methodological challenges involved in this demand. I will address both points here, focusing on the colonisation of the Americas as an example of how political structures and actors at different levels develop certain views that end up affecting how something like the philosophical canon looks and what challenges arise when trying to correct that.
A good way to provide theoretical justification to the demand to diversify the canon can come from looking into the work of Peruvian sociologist Anibal Quijano. Throughout his lifetime, Quijano developed an approach known as the colonial matrix of power. This approach can be used to understand colonization, an important historical phenomenon that has shaped the last five hundred years on the planet, in a more comprehensive way. A key element this framework posits is that assuming colonisation as a one-off event is not conducive to understanding the phenomenon. Instead, we are invited to think of colonisation as a set of relations that, even if traced back to an original important historical event, still endure through time and shape different aspects of a society hundreds of years later. As an example of this, we can think of Alexander the Great’s actions in the 4th century BCE, and how they shaped Europe and Asia in a way that would make the Roman Empire possible centuries later. Similarly, we could think of how Tupac Inca Yupanqui, in the 15th century CE, unified South American trading routes in a way that a couple of centuries later would allow the Spanish Empire to control the whole Andean region.
To conceive of a reality where the effects of colonialism are no longer present would be short-sighted.
As those two examples show, although we can study some historical events alone, to conceive of them as detached from other elements would be rather naïve. In the same vein, consider European colonisation, a process which between the 16th and 20th centuries led Europeans to control about 80% of the planet. To conceive of a reality where the effects of colonialism are no longer present would be short-sighted. Another implication of the use of the colonial matrix of power as a framework is that it becomes obvious that certain ways of thinking or certain ideas have indeed been preferred over others due to the role that knowledge plays in the shaping of political projects. Knowledge production, selection, and dissemination are all elements that the colonial matrix of power invites us to reflect upon. Thus, it should not come as a surprise that political projects, such as the one known as the colonisation of the Americas, had epistemic goals or constraints attached to them. Staying with the two examples I provided above, denying that Alexander the Great had a massive impact on the Hellenisation of Europe and other parts of the world, or that Tupac Inca Yupanqui had a role in the expansion of Quechua as the dominant language and culture in South America, would be very hard to defend. Those who think that events that took place in Greece over two thousand years ago can shape the life of contemporary Europe, but events that took place only five hundred years ago in the Americas cannot shape it to this day, can be rightfully called out for suffering from a very clear case of cognitive dissonance.
If we follow that kind of reasoning, a demand to expand the philosophical canon could be framed also as a demand to understand which political choices were made in light of colonial relations of power, and how those choices could have led to the current state of affairs of the set of ideas usually referred to as the philosophical canon. That is, which ideas or ways of thinking were deemed as useful for the different political projects of colonization, and which were deemed as problematic or dangerous. By approaching the topic in this way, it becomes much more obvious that certain ways of engaging with questions around race, gender, class, nature, reality, and so on, benefited certain goals. This approach provides a very plausible explanation of why the canon looks the way it does today.
For the purposes of this essay, I want to focus on the case of the colonisation of the Andean region of South America, and particularly on pre-colonial Andean Philosophy. I consider the relative global lack of awareness of pre-colonial Andean Philosophy a core example of how the colonial matrix of power can be useful to understand how some gaps in the current canon can be explained. To make sense of this, one must first be aware of the existence of the four Alexandrine Bulls, issued in 1493 by Rodrigo Borgia, also known as Pope Alexander VI. They were titled, in order: Inter caetera, Inter caetera II, Eximiae devotionis, and Dudum siquidem. Together, these documents granted the monarchs of Spain and Portugal dominion over large parts of the Americas. The theoretical and legal position that was developed from these documents, among others, would later be known as the infamous Doctrine of Discovery. Under the doctrine of discovery, the kings of Spain and Portugal could claim any discovered land, within certain geographical boundaries, as long as such lands were not ruled by a Christian prince. In practice, this doctrine became the ultimate justification for European colonialism across the planet.
To say that Andean philosophical knowledge was simply sidestepped would be wrong.
As an important sidenote, despite what some readers might think, this doctrine was not explicitly rejected by the Catholic Church until the spring of 2023. Pope Francis rejected it only after his 2022 trip to Canada, where he visited to apologized personally for the historical and contemporary failings of the Catholic Church and its participation in practices such as the implementation and management of the residential school system – a system that effectively promoted the genocide of Indigenous peoples in the country for over a hundred years. While on the trip, Indigenous leaders and scholars demanded the explicit renunciation of the doctrine of discovery. This eventually led to the ultimate abjuration of the doctrine. I consider that this case provides us with one of the most interesting examples of how decisions made in the 15th century with the goal of justifying the seizing of Indigenous land and lives, have a lasting impact reaching our days.
Going back to the case under consideration, the right to rule these ‘new’ lands came with the obligation to exalt and disseminate the Catholic faith among their inhabitants. In this way, an insidious connection between political and religious goals took place; one in which projects to control and dominate an entire continent were intertwined with epistemic goals. The goals were connected to the elimination of local views that could oppose those projects. Since the Inquisition was meant to deal with members of the Catholic faith, and not those outside the Church, new institutions and practices were developed to deal with Indigenous peoples of the Americas – specifically, to facilitate the elimination of Indigenous views which threatened the claims of the Catholic monarchs and the Church. Among those new institutions and practices, the example of the Extirpations of Idolatries needs to be considered as central in understanding why we know so little about pre-colonial Andean Philosophy.
Any individual that claimed the title of Extirpator of Idolatries had a mandate to eradicate any religious or cultural view that could oppose the teachings of the Catholic Church. To do this, they would visit a town, communicate their authority, gather information of ‘sacred’ places or items, and then proceed to destroy them. All this while promoting the abjuration of what they considered idolatries. These views, as one can imagine, were usually held by the local knowledge keepers known in Quechua as amautas. In some cases, extreme measures would be used against Indigenous populations. From physical to psychological violence, extirpators were granted a large degree of autonomy in their pursuit of their goals. These practices took place in the span of three centuries and were, sadly, quite successful. I say successful, because they managed to effectively eradicate large swaths of knowledge that Andean civilisation had carefully accumulated for over five thousand years. Yes, in less than three hundred years, most of the knowledge that had been kept since civilisation started in that part of the world was eradicated. The reason? It was deemed as a threat to the dominant views from both the Catholic Church and the European empires.
Views about time, space, nature, gender, nature, etc., were hunted and eliminated to such a degree that discussions in most philosophical academic circles are either extremely hard or impossible to come by. To say that Andean philosophical knowledge was simply sidestepped would be wrong. At this time, we simply lack the resources to even engage with it in meaningful ways, and that, as I showed before, is by design. A colonial project was implemented in that part of the world and those in command of that project deemed certain ways of knowing the world as competition and as such, those ways had to be eliminated. This is, probably, one of the best examples of how by using the colonial matrix of power we can provide an explanation, in terms of relationships of domination and political goals, of why certain philosophical traditions simply are not part of the canon. With this reality in mind, I want to address my second point: the methodological challenges that diversifying the canon would entail.
It is not uncommon to find the usual suspects who claim that unless something is somehow related to European men, it cannot be properly conceived as philosophy.
Continuing with my example of pre-colonial Andean Philosophy, I want to focus on what demands to diversify the canon would imply. As I mentioned before, most resources that could have informed any discussion of what pre-colonial Andean Philosophy would look like, as well as the views we can attribute to different groups within that part of the world, were actively destroyed. If that is the case, then how can diversification happen? What would it entail to try to diversify the canon by including something like pre-colonial Andean Philosophy? The answer to both questions is simply more work than what many individuals might assume.
My own research is focused on trying to reconstruct pre-colonial Andean philosophy from two sources. The first one is the Huarochirí Manuscript, and the second is a set of legal cases from the 17th and 18th centuries against Indigenous people of the Andes for the crime of idolatry. The first source is, without a doubt, the most important Andean document in existence. This is a manuscript compiled in secret by Choquecasa, a local Indigenous nobleman, at the bequest of the priest Francisco de Ávila, one of the most successful extirpators of his time. In this manuscript, Choquecasa, most likely due to his position as a member of Quechua nobility, was able to secretly record creation stories, practices, and foundational myths of the central Andes region from amautas. Later on, the manuscript was used by de Avila to effectively identify which ideas, places, and individuals had to be eliminated. The manuscript, written in Quechua, was neglected for centuries after the death of de Avila and left in the archives of the Library of Madrid. Luckily for all of us, by the 1930s, Hermann Trimborn, a German expert on American Indigenous cultures, would approach the manuscript with working knowledge of Quechua and properly appreciate its relevance.
While the Huarochirí Manuscript contains a host of wonderful philosophical insights about time, space, nature, human-animal relationships, and more, I also thought it would be useful to rely on alternative sources. For that reason, I engaged with a set of legal cases from the 17th and 18th centuries that are hosted in the archives of the Archbishop of Lima. In those cases, charges of idolatry and sorcery are leveled against Indigenous people. While interesting from a purely historical perspective, the description of the crimes also serves as a relevant tool to put together practices regarding nature, medicine, agriculture, etc., which also show several philosophical views that underlie many of those practices.
I will explain some of the methodological challenges that are connected to working with these sources. First, it is important to be aware of the lack of access to regular philosophical sources like philosophy texts. As I mentioned at the beginning of this essay, it is not uncommon to find the usual suspects who claim that unless something is somehow related to European men, it cannot be properly conceived as philosophy. If we add the reality that the sources people like myself are relying on do not look like the kind of philosophical texts that are common in the Western philosophical canon, then the chances of having one’s work discarded increase as well. For my research, I rely on what philosopher James Maffie, an expert on Mesoamerican pre-colonial thought, calls triangulation, a way of finding philosophically relevant information from sources that do not resemble philosophical texts. This kind of work, however, allows for the challenge of how something like an Indigenous story could count as a philosophical source to be raised. Although I have published on this topic and developed a whole account about how philosophical sources can be identified, these kinds of methodological challenges are not rare and keep happening at every corner.
I am convinced that humanity’s future can benefit from learning from humanity’s past.
Second, it is also important to notice that many of those sources are not going to be written in English, the lingua franca of our times. So, access to “diverse” sources gets even more complex. The number of philosophy PhD holders with training in Indigenous philosophical methodologies is extremely limited, and the number of those who can work on or with an Indigenous language is also quite small. To that, we have to add the difficulties attached to accessing sources like the ones I mentioned above. What I have in mind, based on my personal experience, is the challenge of properly learning palaeography–that is, learning how to read ancient handwritten texts. Finally, and insofar as sometimes those texts are not digitised, accessing those sources involves traveling to the archives in different parts of the world.
None of the points I have raised should be understood as a rejection of the demand to diversify the canon. On the contrary, I am part of the movement of academic philosophers who actively seeks to see this demand come to fruition. I am convinced that humanity’s future can benefit from learning from humanity’s past. If we fail to put the pieces of the worldviews of our predecessors together, we might be limiting our potential to understand how to do better. The drastic loss of much Andean thought is but an example of this sad reality that we need to revert. However, I also think that we need to understand that this demand cannot be materialised unless first, we are able to make sense of why the canon might look how it does nowadays, and second, we are aware of the difficulties that diversification entails. If academic philosophers are serious about this kind of project, and I know many are, we need to do better than provide rhetorical moves and start thinking in terms that address the theoretical and methodological demands that real diversification would demand.
Jorge Sanchez-Perez is an associate professor in the University of Alberta’s Department of Philosophy. He is an academic philosopher and a trained lawyer whose research interests include social epistemology, Indigenous philosophy, early modern philosophy, and moral and legal philosophy. He is the lead researcher of the SSHRC funded project “The Indigenous Stories of Philosophy.” His first manuscript, "Indigeneity and the Mestizo Question: The Limits of Latin American Philosophy," is forthcoming in 2027. He has published in the fields of Indigenous philosophical methodologies, meta philosophical issues surrounding Latin American Philosophy, race in Early Modern Philosophy, the nature of law, and Global Justice.
First published online 1 November 2026
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