viasophia
English

Authors

The voices we listen to — in alphabetical order.

A

B

  • Chonon Bensho

    contemporaine · shipibo-konibo

    Shipibo-Konibo artist from the community of Santa Clara de Yarinacocha (Ucayali, Peruvian Amazon), legally named Astrith Gonzales. Descended from Onanya healer-sages, she has mastered *kené*, the geometric art considered curative, which she extends into painting and embroidery. With her husband Pedro Favaron, she writes to pass on—openly and freely—the wisdom of her ancestors, including the word *akinananti*, the work done together for the good of all. A voice from within (Indigenous by birth).

  • Buddha (attrib.)

    env. 563-483 av. J.-C. (datation discutée) · bouddhisme

    Siddhārtha Gautama, a Śākya prince from northern India who became a hermit and then an “awakened one” (buddha). No writings survive in his own hand: the discourses (suttas) were passed down orally before being set down in Pali several centuries later (Tipiṭaka). The Pali canon, preserved by the Theravāda tradition and now accessible via SuttaCentral, remains the closest source to the original teaching.

C

  • Cicero

    106-43 av. J.-C. · philosophie occidentale

    Marcus Tullius Cicero, Roman statesman, lawyer, and orator, crafted a Latin philosophical tradition that adapted the Greek legacy—Academic, Stoic, Epicurean—for the Roman reader. In his later years, he wrote a series of moral dialogues: on duty (*De officiis*), on old age (*De senectute*), and on friendship (*Laelius de amicitia*). The *Laelius* has the elder Gaius Laelius speak of his lost friendship with Scipio Africanus, placing virtue at the foundation of any true bond.

  • John Climacus

    Bio to be completed.

  • COSHIKOX

    voix collective shipibo-konibo-xetebo · shipibo-konibo

    Shipibo Konibo Xetebo Council—the representative body of the Shipibo-Konibo-Xetebo people, which brings together one hundred and forty-four communities along the Ucayali River in the Peruvian Amazon. Not a single author, but a collective, accountable voice, dated, speaking on behalf of these communities to the state and corporations. In its 2017 public statement, it condemns the piracy of *kené* (the Shipibo geometric art) by a textile firm and the patent filed on huito dye, calling it “illicit appropriation of ancestral knowledge.” Source status: level 2 (named collective voice)—“according to COSHIKOX,” never “the Shipibo say.” The closed knowledge of healing songs is not unearthed: we stick to what the council itself has made public.

  • John of the Cross

    1542-1591 · mystique chrétienne

    Spanish Discalced Carmelite, companion to Teresa of Ávila in the reform of the order, imprisoned by the Calced Carmelites in 1577. It was in prison that he composed *The Spiritual Canticle*. Author of *The Ascent of Mount Carmel*, *The Dark Night*, and *The Living Flame of Love*. His mysticism links purification—<em>“night of the senses,” “night of the spirit”</em>—and union with God in utter dispossession (<em>nada</em>).

D

  • Luis Dunu Jiménez Dësi

    contemporain · matses

    Hunter and healer of the Matsés people in the Ibama community, in the Amazon rainforest between the Pardo and Yavarí rivers, on the Brazilian side of the border with Peru. "My name is Dunu," he says; he doesn’t know his exact age—perhaps 65—as he was young when the Summer Institute of Linguistics missionaries made contact with the Matsés in 1969. His mother, Dësi, captured from the Dëmushbo tribe, was a shaman, as were his grandfather Dunu and his uncle Uaqui, the finest healer of his time, who taught him over a thousand medicinal plants. From this knowledge and the energy passed down to him, he heals his people. He entrusted the Matsés’ vision of the world—its layers, its spirits, its masters of trees and waters, and the energy (*sinan*, *dayac*) that flows from one body to another—to the collection *El ojo verde. Cosmovisiones amazónicas* (FORMABIAP/AIDESEP), whose illustrations he drew with his grandson Dunu Daniel. A voice from within: a Matsés man speaking of the Matsés world.

  • Vinciane Despret

    1959 · contemporain

    Vinciane Despret, born in 1959 in Brussels, is a Belgian philosopher and psychologist of science. She teaches at the University of Liège and the Université libre de Bruxelles.

E

  • Black Elk

    1863-1950 · lakota

    Black Elk, an Oglala Lakota medicine man—*Heȟáka Sápa*, "Black Elk"—and cousin of Crazy Horse, was born in the time of the free plains and died on the Pine Ridge Reservation. At the age of nine, ill, he received a great vision that would shape his life. A witness to Little Bighorn (1876) and the Wounded Knee massacre (1890), he saw his people’s circular camp dismantled and replaced by square houses. In 1931, he dictated his account to the poet John G. Neihardt: *Black Elk Speaks* (1932) is a two-voiced work—words in Lakota, translated by his son Ben, shaped by Neihardt. In it, he names the *sacred hoop* and sets against the colonial box this clear idea: *« there can be no power in a square. »* A mediated inner voice: we say *« according to Black Elk, as transcribed by Neihardt, »* never *« the Lakota say. »*

  • Epictetus

    50-135 · stoïcisme

    Freed slave turned Stoic master in Rome and later Nicopolis (Epirus). He himself wrote nothing; his teachings were recorded by his disciple Arrian in the form of *Discourses* (*Diatribai*) and summarized in the *Handbook* (*Encheiridion*). The distinction between what depends on us and what does not is his most enduring contribution.

  • Epicurus

    341-270 av. J.-C. · philosophie occidentale

    Greek philosopher born on Samos, founder in Athens of the Garden (Kēpos) school, open to women and slaves. Of his vast body of work, only fragments and three letters survive—those recorded by Diogenes Laërtius, including the *Letter to Menoeceus*, which sums up his ethics. The pleasure he places at the heart of a happy life is not indulgence but the absence of disturbance (*ataraxia*) and pain, achieved through the sorting of desires and frugality (*autarkeia*). Often slandered in his lifetime and after, he in fact advocated a serene sobriety.

F

  • Desert Fathers

    IIIe-Ve s. · mystique chrétienne

    The first Christian monks who, as early as the late third century, withdrew (*anachōrēsis*) into the deserts of Egypt and Palestine: Antony, Arsenius, Macarius, Pachomius, Hilarion. They leave the world and their possessions to seek God in solitude, silence, and mortification. Their lives and sayings (*Apophthegmata*) establish the virtues of the solitary—non-possession, custody of thoughts, humility. Source cited here: the French compilation by Michel-Ange Marin, *Selected Lives of the Desert Fathers of the East* (1861).

  • Pedro Favaron

    contemporain · shipibo-konibo

    Writer, poet, and researcher born in Lima, PhD in literature from the University of Montreal. Through marriage, he entered the Shipibo-Konibo family and community of Santa Clara de Yarinacocha, where he is known as Inin Niwe—a non-Indigenous adopted member by birth. Alongside his wife, Chonon Bensho, he co-authors texts that bring Amazonian ancestral knowledge into dialogue with modern science. Source status: level 2 (integrated ally, never presented as the voice of the people).

H

  • Epeli Hauʻofa

    1939-2009 · tonga

    Scholar, writer, and Tongan anthropologist, born in Salamo (Papua New Guinea) to Tongan missionary parents, educated in Australia and Canada, and long settled in Fiji, where he founded and directed the Oceania Centre for Arts and Culture at the University of the South Pacific in Suva. His essay *Our Sea of Islands* (1993) became a foundational text of contemporary Oceanian thought: countering the scholarly discourse that reduced the Pacific to tiny states “too small, too poor, too isolated,” he set against it the vision of a sea of islands—a vast world bound by the ocean, measured by its relations rather than its surfaces. A voice from within, in English (his language of writing); a voice named and situated, speaking of Oceania without claiming to sum it up: “according to Hauʻofa,” never “the Oceanian people say.”

  • Augustine of Hippo

    354-430 · mystique chrétienne

    Aurelius Augustinus, né à Thagaste (Numidie, actuelle Algérie), rhéteur converti au christianisme à Milan en 386, évêque d'Hippone à partir de 395. Les Confessions (397-401) mêlent récit de conversion et méditation : le livre XI, à propos de la création, déploie l'analyse du temps la plus célèbre de l'Antiquité tardive — le passé n'est plus, l'avenir n'est pas encore, et les trois temps n'existent que dans l'âme, distendue entre mémoire, attention et attente.

I

J

  • Vine Deloria Jr.

    1933-2005 · dakota

    A Sioux jurist, theologian, and historian from Standing Rock, of Yankton Dakota descent, one of the most influential Indigenous thinkers in the United States. Former director of the National Congress of American Indians, he became the voice of a generation with *Custer Died for Your Sins* (1969), later a professor of Native American studies (Arizona, Colorado). In *God Is Red* (1973), he contrasts the Western religion of time—history unfolding from an origin toward a destiny—with a religion of space: for many First Nations, the sacred resides in specific places, and every part of the land carries the stories that shaped the people. It was he who named this “<em>sacred geography</em>.” A voice from within, in English, his language of writing; he speaks of many nations, but one says “according to Deloria,” never “the Sioux say.”

K

L

M

  • Fernando Huanacuni Mamani

    contemporain · aymara

    Aymara jurist, writer, and diplomat from Bolivia, trained in Andean knowledge as well as in law. For the Andean Coordination of Indigenous Organizations (CAOI), he synthesized the philosophy of *vivir bien* in *Buen Vivir / Vivir Bien: Filosofía, políticas, estrategias y experiencias regionales andinas* (Lima, 2010), a foundational text of the Andean movement. The Aymara *suma qamaña* and the Quechua *sumak kawsay* do not refer to individual "well-being" or the "living better" that accumulates at others' expense, but to a life of fullness, harmony, and balance with all forms of existence—including Mother Earth. An insider’s voice, in Spanish; source status: level 2 (named Indigenous author backed by an accountable Andean Indigenous organization). One says "according to Huanacuni / the CAOI," never "the Andeans say.

  • Karl Marx

    1818-1883 · philosophie occidentale

    Philosopher, economist, journalist, activist. Born in Trier, exiled to Paris, Brussels, then London, where he lived in poverty with Engels’ support. *Capital* (Volume I, 1867) unfolds a critique of political economy grounded in the analysis of the commodity, labor, and value. Marx reads Hegel, Feuerbach, Smith, Ricardo, and devises a method (historical materialism) that turns philosophy into an analysis of concrete social relations.

  • N. Scott Momaday

    1934-2024 · kiowa

    Kiowa writer born in Lawton, Oklahoma, the first Native American author in the United States to receive the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction (1969, *House Made of Dawn*). *The Way to Rainy Mountain* (1969) retraces his people’s migration, from the headwaters of the Yellowstone to the plains of Oklahoma, weaving together three voices—ancient myth, history, and personal memory. Poet, novelist, and painter, professor of literature (Stanford, Arizona), he made language the place where land and a people’s sense of itself hold together. An inner voice: a Kiowa writing his own people, in English, his language of writing.

  • Michel de Montaigne

    1533-1592 · philosophie occidentale

    Michel Eyquem, lord of Montaigne, gentleman of Périgord, magistrate and later mayor of Bordeaux. *The Essays* (three books, 1580–1588) invent a new genre: cultivated autobiographical prose that thinks by groping. Montaigne reads Seneca, Plutarch, the skeptics, rejects systems, observes the customs of Brazil and China without hierarchy. His motto: *"What do I know?"*

  • Edgar Morin

    1921-2026 · philosophie occidentale

    Edgar Nahoum, French sociologist and philosopher. A Resistance fighter from 1942, a communist until 1951. The father of complex thought: a rejection of the separation between disciplines, the interplay of disorder, organization, the subject, and the environment. *La Méthode* (six volumes, 1977–2004) unfolds this program across cosmology, life, knowledge, ideas, humanity, and ethics. He died in June 2026.

  • Baptiste Morizot

    1983 · contemporain

    Baptiste Morizot, né en 1983, est un philosophe français spécialisé dans l'étude des relations entre l'humain et le reste du vivant. Il exerce comme maître de conférences à l'université d'Aix-Marseille.

  • David Mowaljarlai

    c. 1928–1996 · ngarinyin

    Elder and Ngarinyin lawman from the Kimberley (north-west Australia), heir to the Wandjina culture. Concerned with passing on "two sides"—his law and that of the newcomers—he shared part of his knowledge beyond his community in *Yorro Yorro* (with photographer Jutta Malnic, Magabala Books, 1993; revised edition 2014). The title, a Ngarinyin word, speaks of creation as an ongoing gift: "everything stands, alive," the world endlessly renewed.

O

  • Gonawindúa Tayrona Organization

    voix collective kággaba · kogi

    Representative organization of the Kággaba (Kogi) people of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta in northern Colombia. It speaks on behalf of the communities to the state and institutions—not a single author, but a collective, accountable voice, dated. In its public documents—such as the 2012 territorial planning proposal, written "for the understanding of outsiders"—it sets out the *Ley de Origen*, the law of origin inscribed in the earth’s codes rather than in words, in a concrete struggle to protect ancestral territory. Source status: level 2 (named collective voice). The mamos’ esoteric knowledge is not unearthed: only what the OGT itself has made public is considered.

  • George Orwell

    Bio to be completed.

P

  • Blaise Pascal

    1623-1662 · mystique chrétienne

    Mathematician, physicist (Pascal’s law), inventor of the calculating machine, converted to Jansenist Christianity after the "night of fire" on November 23, 1654 (*Memorial*). *Pensées*, published posthumously in 1670 from fragments, was intended as an *Apology for Christianity*. It contains an anthropology without illusions (<em>divertissement</em>, misery, greatness) and a mysticism of God’s hiddenness.

R

  • Eusebio Laos Ríos

    contemporain · ashaninka

    Born in the San Carlos range in the central jungle of Peru, he is an Asháninka specialist who lives in the community of San Pablo Tres Unidos, in the district of Puerto Bermúdez (Oxapampa). His Asháninka name, Oshipiyo Ararooshi Iriooshi, means "song of the known relative of the sun"; his father was a *sheripiari*, a tobacco healer who communicated with the beings of nature. In *El ojo verde. Cosmovisiones amazónicas* (FORMABIAP/AIDESEP), a collection where named Amazonians themselves present the thought of their people, he entrusted the Asháninka vision of the world—the living Sun of which men are particles, the water that is its breath, the air that is the spirit of water. A voice from within: an Asháninka who speaks of the Asháninka world.

  • Jalal al-Din Rumi

    1207-1273 · soufisme

    Djalāl ad-Dīn Rūmī, poète et mystique persan, naquit en 1207 à Balkh et mourut en 1273 à Konya. Il est reconnu comme une figure majeure du soufisme et auteur du *Masnavī*, œuvre centrale de cette tradition spirituelle.

S

  • Arthur Schopenhauer

    1788-1860 · philosophie occidentale

    German philosopher, an early reader of Kant and the *Upaniṣads* (via Anquetil-Duperron’s Latin translation). *The World as Will and Representation* (1819) constructs a metaphysics in which blind will is the thing-in-itself behind phenomena. Liberation comes through aesthetic contemplation, asceticism, and compassion (*Mitleid*). The first Western philosopher to seriously integrate Indian thought.

  • Seneca

    4 av. J.-C. – 65 ap. · stoïcisme

    Lucius Annaeus Seneca—philosopher, playwright, tutor and later advisor to Nero—was forced to take his own life by the emperor. He wrote the *Letters to Lucilius* (124 moral epistles addressed to a younger friend), the *Dialogues* (on anger, the brevity of life, the tranquility of the soul), and works on natural philosophy (*Natural Questions*). In his hands, Stoicism becomes concrete, practical, conversational.

  • Seneca

    1872-1950 · vedānta

    Aurobindo Ghose, educated at Cambridge, initially a figure of Bengali independence, imprisoned for a year by the colonial administration, withdrew in 1910 to Pondicherry, where he devoted himself to the inner life. *The Life Divine* (1939–1940), his masterwork, reinterprets the Upanishads and the *Gita* by rejecting the double rejection—<em>that of the materialist who denies the spirit, that of the ascetic who denies the world</em>: existence is *Satchidānanda* (Being-Consciousness-Bliss), and the evolution of consciousness is its unfolding.

  • Leanne Betasamosake Simpson

    née en 1971 · nishnaabeg

    Writer, scholar, and musician of Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg heritage. In the mid-1990s, as a young researcher, she worked on an atlas of land use with elders from Long Lake #58 in Ontario’s boreal forest—an experience that became the foundation of her thought: her nation’s theory resides in its practices. A PhD from the University of Manitoba, she later trained with elders from her own territory, making resurgence—*biiskabiyang*, the return to oneself—the core of her work (*Dancing on Our Turtle’s Back*, 2011; *As We Have Always Done*, 2017). An insider’s voice: a Nishnaabeg woman thinking through her own nation, in English, her language of writing.

  • Benedict de Spinoza

    1632-1677 · philosophie occidentale

    Philosopher of Amsterdam, born into a Sephardic Jewish family exiled from Portugal, excommunicated from the synagogue at twenty-three for his heterodox views. A grinder of optical lenses, he lived on the margins of academic institutions. The *Ethics*, published posthumously in 1677, unfolds a geometry of the mind where God and nature are one (*Deus sive Natura*) and where joy is not an end but a passage to greater power of action.

T

W

  • Simone Weil

    1909-1943 · mystique chrétienne

    Philosopher, agrégée, trade union activist, factory worker (Renault, 1934–1935), volunteer in Republican Spain, exiled in London during the war. Reader of ancient Greek, the Upanishads, the Gospels. Died at 34 of tuberculosis in Ashford. *Gravity and Grace*, published posthumously by Gustave Thibon, distinguishes the pull of the passions from grace as pure attention.

Y

  • Chiri Yukie

    1903-1922 · ainu

    Young Ainu woman from Horobetsu (Hokkaidō), niece of the storyteller Imekanu and trained by her grandmother in her people’s oral songs. Encouraged by the linguist Kyōsuke Kindaichi, she became the first Ainu to transcribe in the Latin alphabet—and to translate herself—the *yukar*, the songs in which the *kamuy* speak in the first person. She completed the manuscript of the *Ainu shin’yōshū* the night before her death at nineteen, from heart failure. The collection was published in 1923: a monument of Ainu literature, written from within.

  • Tyson Yunkaporta

    contemporain · apalech

    Academic, artist, and traditional toolmaker, a member of the Apalech clan—on the west coast of the Cape York Peninsula, in northeastern Australia, where Wik-Mungkan is spoken. Of Nungar/Koori Aboriginal descent, he was adopted long ago under Aboriginal Law, which grants him this name alone. A doctor, he publishes his research on Aboriginal ways of knowing; to teach, he draws lines in the sand. *Sand Talk* (2019) examines the major issues of our time through this knowledge: understanding as relationship, not possession. An insider’s voice, in English; the pronoun *ngal*, “we-two,” asserts that one never thinks alone.

Z