Abstract
White supremacy dominates the academy and political discussions. It first
consists of conflating the geography of the West (where Black, Indigenous, and People
of Color—BIPOC—are to be found) with a specific colonizing tradition originating in
ancient Greek thought—call this tradition the West. Secondly, and more profoundly,
it consists in treating this tradition as the frame for the study of every other
intellectual tradition, which since the Romans it brands as religion. The political
function of this marginalization of BIPOC philosophy is to shield Western colonialism
from moral philosophical criticism. The mechanism of colonialism is interpretation—
explanation in terms of propositional attitudes, like belief. Not only is this a basic
commitment of the Western tradition owing to its foundational linguistic account of
thought (LAT), the South Asian moral philosophy of Yoga shows interpretation to be
the essence of irresponsibility: it undermines the possibilities of choice as it is
antilogical and is the mechanism of oppression. In contrast, Yoga, a fourth basic
ethical theory (in addition to virtue ethics, consequentialism, and deontology)
identifies an alternate metaethical choice as the essence of moral responsibility:
explication—understanding in terms of inferential relationships. Yoga is not only the
locus classicus for a nondiscriminatory, antioppressive approach to moral standing: it
constitutes reason-based, (both ideal and nonideal) normative practices of solidarity
with people (including nonhumans and celestial bodies like the Earth). This paper
explores the mutually exclusive disjunction between interpretation and explication,
the historical impact of these methodologies, and the colonization by the West of
philosophy in the game of Publish or Perish. Shaking this off is as easy as returning to
the philosophically indigenous practice of explication.