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This volume provides the key to a deepened discourse on philosophy in Africa. Available literature and academic practice in African philosophy since the 1960s have largely featured discourses in the areas of origin, general meaning and nature of the discipline, with little attention given to specialized areas. By contrast, this book examines a noticeable shifting focus from such general concerns to more specific subject-matter, in such areas as epistemology, moral philosophy, metaphysics, aesthetics, and social and political philosophy in the light of the African experience. The volume includes specific discourses from expert contributors on the nature, history and scope of African ethics and metaphysics, while also discussing particular themes in African epistemology, philosophy of education, existentialism and political philosophy. Researchers seeking for new perspective on African philosophy will find this work thought-provoking, instructive and informative.
First Published in 2002. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.
This volume is a collection of chapters about contemporary issues within African philosophy. They are issues African philosophy must grapple with to demonstrate its readiness to make a stand against some of the challenges society faces in the coming decade such as xenophobia, Afro-phobia, extreme poverty, democratic failure and migration. The text covers new methodical directions and there is focus on the conversationalist, complementarist and consolationist movements within the field as well as the place of the Indigenous Knowledge System.The collection speaks to African philosophy’s place in intellectual history with coverage of African Ethics and African socio-political philosophy. Contributors come from a variety of different backgrounds, institutions and countries. Through their innovative ideas, they provide fresh insight and intellectual energy. The book appeals to philosophy students and researchers.
In this undergraduate textbook Lewis R. Gordon offers the first comprehensive treatment of Africana philosophy, beginning with the emergence of an Africana (i.e. African diasporic) consciousness in the Afro-Arabic world of the Middle Ages. He argues that much of modern thought emerged out of early conflicts between Islam and Christianity that culminated in the expulsion of the Moors from the Iberian Peninsula, and from the subsequent expansion of racism, enslavement, and colonialism which in their turn stimulated reflections on reason, liberation, and the meaning of being human. His book takes the student reader on a journey from Africa through Europe, North and South America, the Caribbean, and back to Africa, as he explores the challenges posed to our understanding of knowledge and freedom today, and the response to them which can be found within Africana philosophy.
This is the first comprehensive volume on African ethics, centered on Ubuntu and its relevance today. Important contemporary issues are explored, such as African bioethics, business ethics, traditional African attitudes to the environment, and the possible development of a new form of democracy based on indigenous African political systems. In a world that has become interconnected, this anthology demonstrates that African ethics can make valuable contributions to global ethics. It is not only African academics, students, organizations, or those individuals committed to ethics that are envisaged as the beneficiaries of this book, but all humankind. A number of topics presented here were inspired by a Shona proverb that says, Ndarira imwe hairiri (One brass wire cannot produce a sound). The chorus of voices in African Ethics demonstrates this proverbial truism.
This book highlights the specificities of African systems of thought through a wide range of issues on the history, branches and problems that animate the philosophical debates among African authors. The book uses the Competence-Based Approach to present lessons rooted in real-life situations in Africa. Since the African philosophy courses of most academic institutions were conceived with a “colonial mindset”, the book provides the theoretical framework for the “decolonization” of the African mindset and African philosophy course content in academic institutions. The book also gives a precise and concise methodology for reading, understanding and critically analyzing passages in philosophy in general, and African philosophy in particular. Hence, the book is useful to teachers, novice philosophers, undergraduate students, graduates who wish to specialize in African philosophy, and scholars who wish to comparatively analyse African thought systems and other systems of thought across the globe.
This book investigates how knowledge is conceived and explored within the African context. Epistemology, or the theory of knowledge, has historically been dominated by the Western approach to the discourse of knowledge. This book however shines a much-needed spotlight on knowledge systems originating within the African continent. Bringing together key voices from across the field of African philosophy, this book explores the nature of knowledge across the continent and how they are rooted in Africans’ ontological sense of being and self. At a time when moves to decolonize curricula are gaining momentum, this book shows how understanding the specific ways of knowing that form part of the every day life of the African, will play an important part in rebalancing studies of philosophy globally. Employing critical, conceptual and rigorous analyses of the nature and essence of knowledge as understood by indigenous African societies, the book ultimately asks what could pass as an African theory of knowledge. This important guide to the connections between knowledge and being, in African philosophical thought, will be an important resource for researchers and students of philosophy and African studies.
This insightful book is the first edited book volume in the literature to concern itself, primarily, with the question of life’s meaning from the, largely under-explored, African perspective. In this collection, the authors have undertaken to answer this question, and other related questions, by showing some of the possible conceptions of life’s meaning that can be derived from traditional African perspectives. African Perspectives to the Question of Life's Meaning will be a key resource for academics, researchers, and advanced students of philosophy, African studies, psychology, and religion. This book was originally published as a special issue of South African Journal of Philosophy.
In African countries there has been a surge of intellectual interest in foregrounding ideas and thinkers of African origin—in philosophy as in other disciplines—that have been unjustly ignored or marginalized. African scholars have demonstrated that precolonial African cultures generated ideas and arguments which were at once truly philosophical and distinctively African, and several contemporary African thinkers are now established figures in the philosophical mainstream. Yet, despite the universality of its themes, relevant contributions from African philosophy have rarely permeated global philosophical debates. Critical intellectual excavation has also tended to prioritize precolonial thought, overlooking more recent sources of home-grown philosophical thinking such as Africa’s intellectually rich liberation movements. This book demonstrates the potential for constructive interchange between currents of thought from African philosophy and other intellectual currents within philosophy. Chapters authored by leading and emerging scholars: recover philosophical thinkers and currents of ideas within Africa and about Africa, bringing them into dialogue with contemporary mainstream philosophy; foreground the relevance of African theorizing to contemporary debates in epistemology, philosophy of language, moral/political philosophy, philosophy of race, environmental ethics and the metaphysics of disability; make new interventions within on-going debates in African philosophy; consider ways in which philosophy can become epistemically inclusive, interrogating the contemporary call for ‘decolonization’ of philosophy. Showing how foregrounding Africa—its ideas, thinkers and problems—can help with the project of renewing and improving the discipline of philosophy worldwide, this book will stimulate and challenge everyone with an interest in philosophy, and is essential reading for upper-level undergraduate students, postgraduate students and scholars of African and Africana philosophy.