Santiago Castro-Gómez

Alongside Aníbal Quijano, Walter Mignolo, Enrique Dussel, Ramón Grosfoguel, Catherine Walsh, Arturo Escobar, Edgardo Lander and Nelson Maldonado-Torres, Castro-Gómez was part of the "Modernity/Coloniality" group, a circle of Latin American critical theorists formed at the beginning of the 21st century. Castro-Gómez's work develops alternatives to dominant approaches and figures in Latin American Philosophy, an intervention he makes explicit in Critique of Latin American Reason (1996). In addition to colleagues like Aníbal Quijano and Walter Mignolo, his major influences include the Frankfurt School, Friedrich Nietzsche, Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze.

Santiago Castro-Gómez (born 1958, Bogotá, Colombia) is a Colombian philosopher, a professor at the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana and the director of the Pensar Institute in Bogotá.

The work of Castro-Gómez explores the "frontiers" between sociology, anthropology, literary studies and cultural studies, while also reflecting on methodological and epistemological problems within the social sciences. In Zero-Point Hubris, Castro-Gómez characterizes Rene Descartes' 1637 famous statement of "I think, therefore I am" as "the moment white Europeans installed themselves above God as the sole arbiters of knowledge and truth. With this turning point, they began to think of themselves as observers whose scientific methods, morals and ethics overrode those of other cultures."