Emerson Oliveira do Nascimento

This project investigates the genealogy of the modern notion of race in its articulation between reason, universalism, and coloniality. It starts from the hypothesis that race is not merely an effect of social or ideological structures, but an active principle of rationalization and ordering of the world. It seeks to interrogate its conditions of possibility within Western reason itself, showing how it has historically articulated a hierarchy between “full humanity” and “deficient humanity.” The study proposes a double critical movement: (1) to return to the scholastic tradition of Thomas Aquinas, whose rational and hierarchical order of being, founded on divine natural law, guided Christian universalism in colonial expansion