Interculturality, more than a method or a theory to understand the world and what we are as humanity, constitutes a fundamental dimension of the historical process by which the world and humanity develop their ways of reality and coexistence in time. It can be said, in this sense, that interculturality is the substance that nurtures the world and humanity to be historically real and true and represents the language with which the world and humanity communicate that their true evolution happens in a plural manner.

As substance and language of the diversity of the world and humanity, interculturality lets the world and humanity speak in and through the manifestation of the multiple places that contextually conform to their corresponding historical realities. Bear in mind however, that interculturality must be read as a sign of a summons; not as an expression of dispersion or confusion, which would induce experiences of the world and humanity in a manner similar to what is narrated in the history of the Tower of Babel. Interculturality, because it manifests the plurality by which world and humanity speak, confronts us, rather, with the summons of the same language of world and humanity heard in all its variating tones, of its differentiated sonority, to find the storyline of relationships that respectively conform us, precisely because they are all historical versions of the world and humanity.

Intercultural Philosophy is born as an answer to this summons for language of the world and humanity. In this way, it understands its reflective endeavor as a task for interpretation and translation of the dense polyphonic sonority by which the world and humanity let hear the history of the various ways in which its integral reality happens.

Therefore: when in this issue of the Revista Guillermo de Ockham speaks of the “contemporary world” as a challenge to Intercultural Philosophy it is necessary to bear in mind that what this contemporary world represents, as a challenge for a reflective and practical work regarding the intercultural perspective, is not the fact of being world, but rather the fact of being scarcely world, the fact of being a world in which the substance of the world is scarce and the language of the world is silenced. Having said this, I refer specifically to the following: The contemporary world that is referred to herein, as a challenge to Philosophy or Intercultural thinking is the world in its current historical configuration according to the design of the capitalist and mechanistic civilization that is in expansion today throughout all regions of the planet, which presented as the only alternative of a real world that truly has value for a human life and coexistence and that “keeps abreast with the times”.

Undoubtedly, today also, amid the planetary hegemony of the capitalist and mechanistic civilization, there is more world aside from this hegemonic civilization. Proof of this is the struggle of the peoples for their territories and the defense of their ways of life and wisdom. However, undoubtedly also, this form of world reduced and silenced by the capitalist and mechanistic world, bears on territories and peoples as a heavy superstructure, which with the support of all sorts of technologies, threatens with the acceleration of the homogenization of the world and humanity, that is with the weakening and silencing of the diversity of human life and their life worlds.

For this reason, that way of world is highlighted here with the name of “contemporary world”, as a challenge to Intercultural Philosophy. The reason for this is that the expansion of this way of world, answers in the end, to the launching of a process of substitution of the worlds of life of territories and peoples: The intercultural substance of the world that gives way to the many places where the world finds home and offers home in different ways to humanity would be substituted by the mechanical and artificial world that we call (pun intended), modern civilization.

That would be the way to summarize the main challenge that this “contemporary world” places on Intercultural Philosophy. What this means is that one of the main foci in the work of intercultural philosophy is precisely the critique of the mechanistic approach that is spread with this way or form of the “contemporary world”, because it smothers, with the noise of the functions of its machinery, the sonority of the language of the world as the organic weaving of places of life, of relationships, and of references that take root and communicate at the same time. In other words: the main challenge for Philosophy or intercultural thinking today, is to clearly manifest the true, organic, substance of the world with the polyphonic language of the world. Still in other words, western modernity, in Max Weber’s view, carried over as one of its fundamental consequences “the disenchantment of the world”; it would be keen to re-enchant our experiences of the world by listening to the choral chanting of the world.