Jonathan O Chimakonam

It is now clear that the development in African philosophy in the last forty years or so has been in the area of metaphilosophy, the central focus of which has been on whether African philosophy is a pure philosophy. A sizeable chunk of this engagement was manifestly perverse, leaving little or no room for phenomenological discourses. In recent times, some African philosophers have begun agitating for a shift from metaphilosophy to theoretic and applied philosophy. In the spirit of substantive inquiries in African philosophy, conversational philosophy is articulated as one of the new schools of thought in this contemporary period. This shift requires African philosophy to define its place among the world's philosophical traditions and to find new conversations both in place (substantive issues that trouble the postcolonial African life-world) and in space (comparative and intercultural engagements with other philosophical traditions on issues of mutual concern). The aim of this essay is to present African philosophy as a respectable place riding on the crest of conversations, and to demonstrate how this particular place could be transformed into a universal space of comparative thought through conversational method. The overall idea would be to establish that the goal of reason is squarely the global expansion of thought or that the journey of ‘reason’ which begins from the philosophical place is a continuous striving toward the universal space where intercultural engagement—the very hallmark of comparative thought—is unveiled as the ultimate destination of ‘reason’. At this comparative level, varying philosophical places struggle through what Wilson Moses calls ‘creative conflict’ to unravel their similarities and areas of contrast and identify and possibly contest their differences in the light of universal tools of thought. Our methods in this essay shall be critical, evaluative and prescriptive.

That African philosophy began with frustration and not with wonder as it is in Western tradition is a radical statement with far-reaching implications. Implications that are, as challenging as they are intellectually refreshing thus reinvigorating interest in the African discourse. As the discipline of African philosophy vitiated in the post debate disillusionment met with a new generation critical fire; methodic, technical and theoretic demands and issues unresolved in the old order surface. Old questions re-emerge with new and daunting toga while new questions present fresh challenges for thought. With a carefully selected pool of emerging, original, African thinkers, the editor brought a creatively fascinating illumination upon the African episteme to herald the new era of African thought. The essays in this collection remark a sort of radical break from a long standing convention that requires serious critical reconstruction. Presenting a paradigm of creative individual philosophizing, the history, dating, criteria, logic and periodization imbroglio in African philosophy were resolved to give shape and direction to a hitherto formless discipline. Fundamental questions in ontology, epistemology, ethics and political thought gave birth to stunning metanarratives to inaugurate the conversational orientation in African philosophy. It provides a systematization that has been missing for almost a century and upon it defines an intellectually exciting future for the discipline. Whoever that wants to do African philosophy and understand it and make input must read this corpus. Carefully articulated and written, the essays in this collection constitute dependable research resources for students and researchers in all areas of African philosophy and studies.

In this paper, I consider how the discourse on global epistemic justice might be approached differently if some contributions from the African philosophical place are taken seriously. To be specific, I argue that the debate on global justice broadly has not been global. I cite as an example, the exclusion or marginalisation of African philosophy, what it has contributed and what it may yet contribute to the global epistemic edifice. I point out that this exclusion is a case of epistemic injustice. I observe that the absence of a philosophical technique that prevails on philosophers to engage with others from other traditions might be responsible for this epistemic lopsidedness and marginalisation. I go beyond the re-statement of this problem of marginalisation of African philosophy to point out relevant doctrines from the African place. I show how they are united under the methodological and ideological disposition of conversationalism. I argue that this ideology might be a better model for realising the goal of global epistemic justice which is the overcoming of all forms of exclusions and lopsidedness in global epistemic discourses through fair allocation of intellectual spaces.