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Exploding Individuals: Engaging Indigenous Logic and Decolonizing Science

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 January 2020

Rebekah Sinclair
Rebekah Sinclair*
Affiliation:
Department of Philosophy, University of Oregon, Susan Campbell Hall, Eugene, Oregon, 97403
*
Corresponding author. Email: sinclair.rebekah@gmail.com
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Abstract

Despite emerging attention to Indigenous philosophies both within and outside of feminism, Indigenous logics remain relatively underexplored and underappreciated. By amplifying the voices of recent Indigenous philosophies and literatures, I seek to demonstrate that Indigenous logic is a crucial aspect of Indigenous resurgence as well as political and ethical resistance. Indigenous philosophies provide alternatives to the colonial, masculinist tendencies of classical logic in the form of paraconsistent—many-valued—logics. Specifically, when Indigenous logics embrace the possibility of true contradictions, they highlight aspects of the world rejected and ignored by classical logic and inspire a relational, decolonial imaginary. To demonstrate this, I look to biology, from which Indigenous logics are often explicitly excluded, and consider one problem that would benefit from an Indigenous, paraconsistent analysis: that of the biological individual. This article is an effort to expand the arenas in which allied feminists can responsibly take up and deploy these decolonial logics.

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Articles
Information
Hypatia , Volume 35 , Special Issue 1: Indigenizing and Decolonizing Feminist Philosophy , Winter 2020 , pp. 58 - 74
Copyright
Copyright © by Hypatia, Inc. 2020

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