Epistemic pluralities and ethical foundations for the care of life

This chapter starts from the problem associated with modern Western knowledge, which has granted science a hegemonic place in the production of knowledge. That stance has led to the exclusion and invalidation of other knowledges as ways of being, existing, and inhabiting the world. In response, a critical reflection is offered on the construction of a pluralist epistemology through a conceptual analysis grounded in Edgar Morin’s complex thinking and Basarab Nicolescu’s transdisciplinarity, theories used as organizing axes for a proposal of alternative pluri-knowledges. Methodologically, the work adopts an essayistic and hermeneutic perspective that seeks to relate and place in dialogue distinct epistemological horizons—as diverse forms of human knowing—including science, myth, Indigenous knowledges, decolonial perspectives, neuroethics, and Buen Vivir. From this approach, the construction of knowledge is understood as a process of articulation among multiple levels of reality, knowledges, and rationalities. This analysis therefore outlines an alternative view of knowledge construction from a pluriepistemic standpoint that allows the diversity of knowledges to be recognized and validated without hierarchies, in equality and complementarity: a necessary condition for ethically grounding the care of life and for overcoming fragmentary views of present-day knowledge.