Several universalisms

Abstract

After commenting on the current world situation and some recent statements by the Mexican philosopher Luis Villoro on the need for a “new international legal order”, this essay argues in favor of a revival of a universalistic outlook on the human condition and on intercultural and multicultural relations. First, a basic typology of the existent “universalisms” is proposed as well as a universalism based on multiculturalistic and practical-culturalistic phenomenology — based on Husserl but with the intention of going beyond his own philosophical “Eurocentrism”—, as an alternative to the metaphysical universalism of the Western philosophical tradition and to the always formalistic and purely normative modern universalism. Both universalisms are always suspicious of “Eurocentrism”.