The Full quote

René Descartes, the founder of Modern Western Philosophy, inaugurates a new moment in the history of Western thought. He replaces God, as the foundation of knowledge in the Theo-politics of knowledge of the European Middle Ages, with (Western) Man as the foundation of knowledge in European Modern times. All the attributes of God are now extrapolated to (Western) Man. Universal Truth beyond time and space privileges access to the laws of the Universe, and the capacity to produce scientific knowledge and theory is now placed in the mind of Western Man. The Cartesian “Cogito ergo sum” (“I think, therefore I am“) is the foundation of modern Western sciences. By producing a dualism between mind and body and between mind and nature, Descartes was able to claim non-situated, universal, God- eyed view knowledge. This is what the Colombian philosopher Santiago Castro- Gómez called the “point zero” perspective of Eurocentric philosophies (Castro-Gómez 2003). The “point zero” is the point of view that hides and conceals itself as being beyond a particular point of view, that is, the point of view that represents itself as being without a point of view. It is this “god-eye view” that always hides its local and particular perspective under an abstract universalism. Western philosophy privileges “ego politics of knowledge” over the “geopolitics of knowledge” and the “body-politics of knowledge.” Historically, this has allowed Western man (the gendered term is intentionally used here) to represent his knowledge as the only one capable of achieving a universal consciousness, and to dismiss non-Western knowledge as particularistic and, thus, unable to achieve universality.