Swati Arora

Conceptual innovation is highly prized in Western Anglophone philosophy. Yet it often stems from a relatively narrow tradition that takes little account of contributions from other cultures and philosophical practices. We illustrate this point using the example of work done by Dalit feminists on identifying and addressing hermeneutical injustice. Despite their relevance, Dalit feminist contributions are virtually unknown and remain unrecognized in Anglophone philosophical discussions of hermeneutical injustice. This article aims to investigate the reasons for this neglect. One potential reason is the generally low status accorded to experiential knowledge in epistemology, which is pivotal to Dalit feminist accounts. Another reason concerns systematic bias against non-Western philosophy, which may reflect prejudicial stereotypes and the privileging of existing disciplinary norms. We argue that these reasons may explain the exclusion of Dalit feminists’ scholarship. In light of this, we offer two modest suggestions. First, philosophers should cultivate greater openness to citing texts by non-philosophers where these texts are relevant to the topic at hand. Second, we argue that a more embedded and extensive practice of cross-cultural philosophy or comparative philosophy is needed. These two suggestions may reduce neglect of philosophically rich traditions such as Dalit feminism.

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 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.