Chadwin Mark Harris

The question of how to decolonize philosophy has moved from rhetorical consensus to methodological urgency. This study addresses the lack of operational procedures in decolonial thought by examining philosophical methods developed in Latin America and Africa. In the Latin American context, we argue that anthropophagic thought, formulated by Oswald de Andrade in the Cannibalist Manifesto (1928), offers a promising methodological response. We reconstruct this method through four procedural axes - critical appropriation, the dialectic of assimilation and rupture, the valorization of subaltern knowledges, and epistemic irony - and apply them in five steps to Romulo Gallegos’s novel Dona Barbara. In the African context, we examine two leading candidates: Jonathan Chimakonam’s conversational method (CM), grounded in Ezumezu logic, and Kwasi Wiredu’s conceptual decolonisation (CD). Through critical assessment, we argue that CD, understood as a philosophical sensibility attuned to the colonial conditioning of conceptual frameworks, best satisfies the demands of a decolonial method. Our theoretical framework draws on Quijano’s coloniality of power, Mignolo’s coloniality of knowledge, Lugones’s coloniality of gender, Wiredu’s conceptual decolonisation, and Chimakonam’s Ezumezu logic. We conclude that decolonial method must be plural, context-sensitive, and responsive to distinct intellectual histories. Whereas Latin American thought locates methodological experimentation in the novel, African philosophy develops its decolonial impulse primarily through internal disciplinary reflection. Despite these differences, both traditions converge on a shared insight: to decolonize philosophy is to engage critically with colonial legacies - devouring, repairing, and transforming them from within.

In “Prediction, Understanding, and Medicine,” Alex Broadbent rejects the curative thesis, the view that the core medical competence is to cure, in favor of his predictive thesis that the main intellectual medical competence is to explain and the main practical medical competence is to predict. Broadbent thinks his account explains the phenomenon of multiple consultation, which is the fact that people persist in consulting alternative medical traditions despite having access to mainstream medicine. I argue that Broadbent’s explanation of multiple consultation makes sense only from the perspective of patients who migrate from mainstream to alternative consultation. His explanation is not as convincing when we consider alternative-to-mainstream migration. I also provide an argument against Broadbent’s view that prediction is medicine’s main practical competence and argue that, when it comes to explaining most cases of multiple consultation, the curative thesis provides a more convincing explanation than the predictive thesis.