To decolonise philosophy, one might attempt to recover excluded traditions and expand the canon. While historically necessary, this approach is inadequate. Drawing on Fanon's conception of decolonisation as rupture, this paper argues that philosophy's Eurocentrism is not merely the result of forgetting histories but of epistemic destruction whose effects structure the discipline's present. Historical retelling matters not as recovery alone but as a diagnostic tool for locating where epistemic ab…
Read moreTo decolonise philosophy, one might attempt to recover excluded traditions and expand the canon. While historically necessary, this approach is inadequate. Drawing on Fanon's conception of decolonisation as rupture, this paper argues that philosophy's Eurocentrism is not merely the result of forgetting histories but of epistemic destruction whose effects structure the discipline's present. Historical retelling matters not as recovery alone but as a diagnostic tool for locating where epistemic absence has been naturalised as philosophically universal. To make this structure visible, we develop the ignorance‐epistemicide cycle. It explains how colonial epistemicide produces enduring absences, how disciplinary ignorance stabilises those absences and how ordinary philosophical practices reproduce them without explicit exclusion. Thus, the cycle clarifies how coloniality persists as an epistemic structure rather than a fact of the past. On this basis, responsibility for decolonising philosophy is reconceived as resisting being the colonial intellectual. It is forward‐looking, role‐sensitive and grounded in disrupting of epistemic structures shaped by colonial domination.