Edwin Etieyibo

This article is based on an interview conducted by China Africa Talk between Shuchen Xiang, an expert in Chinese philosophy, and Edwin Etieyibo, an expert in African philosophy. The dialogue that follows focuses on the Chinese concept of hehe or “harmony” and the African concept of ubuntu. The two philosophers discuss the characteristics of each concept and how they structure their respective world views. Also discussed are the striking similarities that the two concepts share as a normative and social ideal. In so doing, both Xiang and Etieyibo highlight the potential of hehe and ubuntu as universal concepts that can better serve the project of humanity. This article extends the conversation of the interview and discusses the concepts of ubuntu and hehe from the perspective of philosophical concepts, metaphysics, politics and how they are reflected in daily life and on the macro-level of international relations.

What is wrong with unanimism? And relatedly, we can ask: What is wrong with a communal mind? Both questions, I think, form the fulcrum of many years of Paulin Jidenu Hountondji’s work and his criticism of ethnophilosophy. In this paper, I build on some earlier work in defence of the plausibility of ethnophilosophy as a way of arguing for why ethnophilosophy should be taken seriously. I do this by demonstrating, on the one hand, that the question of unanimism and communal mind, and thus by extension ethnophilosophy, turns on a particular understanding of philosophy and rationality, and on the other hand, how a proper analysis of this understanding provides a ground for conceptualizing the viability of ethnophilosophy. This particular notion of philosophy and rationality, as I will discuss, is central to Hountondji’s criticism, proscription, or argument against ethnophilosophy.

In this chapter we begin some empirical legwork into the question in respect of the sort of intellectual progress that has been made by African philosophers or African philosophy following the metaphilosophical debate in the decades past about its existence, nature, and substance. We consider this investigation to be important for African philosophy not just for stocktaking purposes or the least because of the rising unease, discussions, and protests around a lack of transformation in universities in Africa and the need to Africanize or decolonize the philosophy curriculum in universities in Africa. These are important considerations for embarking on a stocktaking exercise of African philosophy. However, in addition to these considerations, we think that a proper assessment will help invigorate African philosophy and direct African philosophers towards ways of plotting its trajectory for the future. From the data presented, we drew, amongst others, a couple of preliminary conclusions including that philosophy programs in many of the universities in sub-Saharan Africa are westernized, and that there are minimal courses offered in African philosophy in those universities.

This multi-authored volume is a welcome addition to the growing literature in African philosophy. Its principal focus is the invigoration of efforts towards the excavation of knowledge (both extant and primordial) in African philosophy. It does this by the different ways in which the contributions attempt to develop further some important aspects and subthemes in the field. Insofar as the edited collection does this, it contributes to a number of contemporary endeavors aimed at straddling the fine and subtle lines between methodological and substantive issues in African philosophy, on the one hand, and the history of African philosophy as well as the debates about the future direction of African philosophy, on the other hand.

The history of African philosophy is a rich and long one and the debate that began in the 1970s about its nature and existence is one that puts into perspective the different ways of thinking about this history. In thinking about the history of African philosophy there are a number of questions that need reflecting on and attending to. These questions, I believe, have not been given sufficient attention to by scholars working in African philosophy. This includes the question as to who counts as an African philosopher and the question as to whether one has an obligation to work in African philosophy just because one is an African. I discuss these questions in this chapter as part of my aim of contextualizing African philosophy in terms of its history and as it applies to contemporary times.

African philosophy under the specific conditions of a colonial and postcolonial world is - at least since the 20th century if not even earlier - inherently intercultural. The aim and target of the volume is to reveal, interrogate and analyse the intercultural dimension in African philosophy, and to critically interrogate the project of an intercultural philosophy from an African perspective. This volume is the first publication that explicitly discusses African philosophy as a challenge to the project of intercultural philosophy.

What is the status and nature of the “it” and the ontological progression from an “it” to an “it” in Ifeanyi Menkiti’s normative conception of a person? In this article, I attempt to preliminarily give some nuance content to the “it” of childhood and the “it” of the nameless dead. My motivation is straightforwardly simple: to defend Menkiti’s claim that both “its” have some depersonalised moral standing or existence. However, in doing so, I argue that a better account of the ontological progression of personhood is from an “it” to an “it-it” 1 rather than from an “it” to an “it.” On this modified version of the double hyphenated “its”, which is underpinned by the idea of moral force, the prior moral worth of the nameless dead is taken into account as valuable members of our collective immortality, notwithstanding the fact that their names have been forgotten. Keywords: African Philosophy, Collective Immortality, Menkiti, It, It-it, Moral Force, Nameless Dead, Personhood

In line with the tradition of the Conversational School of Philosophy, this essay provides a rare and unique space of discourse for the authors to converse about the place of the ‘ethno’ in African philosophy. This conversation is a revisit, a renewal of the key positions that have coloured the ethnophilosophy debate by the conversers who themselves are notable contributors to arguments for and against the importance of ethnophilosophy in the unfolding of African philosophy particularly in the last decade or so. There are four key positions that have been argued for in the pages of this paper: ethnophilosophy is not African philosophy and it is useless and inimical to the growth of African philosophy and should thus be jettisoned – Matolino; ethnophilosophy is the foundation for African philosophy as it provides the raw materials for African philosophical discourse – Ogbonnaya and Agada; ethnophilosophy has some value for African philosophy but it is definitely not the foundation for genuine African philosophy the way criticism and rigours are – Attoe; and ethnophilosophy can be adequately conceived as African philosophy particularly in terms of its etymology as culture or race philosophy, dealing with a philosophical or critical reflections on, and exposition of, immanent principles in African thought – Mangena and Etieyibo. These conversers provide good arguments for the positions they hold, arguments that are of course, open for further interrogation. Two points can be concluded from the ethnophilosophy debate provided in this essay: the disparities in views among conversers it seems, stem ultimately from the understanding of ethnophilosophy that each converser holds, which varies from the notion of a method used at some point in the history of African philosophy, to an etymological understanding as culture philosophy; and the debate about ethnophilosophy in the spirit of any philosophical tradition remains a perennial one that is yet to be concluded. This essay certainly concretises what is on ground and paves the way for further discussions. Keywords: Ethno, African philosophy, Foundationalist, Universalist, Particularist, The common moral position, Ethnophilosophy

A large and important part of social relations is gender relations between men and women. Over time, the manifestation of such relations has often been one of violence, particularly violence against women. Different approaches have been deployed to deal with the experience of gender-based violence (GBV). One popular approach is the human rights framework that suggest that GBV can be addressed by granting certain rights to women. We argue that while a human rights framework holds some promise in resolving GBV, it is limited in some ways because it does not take the cultural perceptions of gender relations that envision gender duties into account. As part of our argument, we show that social relations in African communities ought to be primarily based on the principle of duty to the other, rather than an emphasis on rights. We conclude that there is a need to complement the rights-based approach with a duty-based approach to effectively address GBV.

This article discusses some of the core values among the Igbos. This is done partly as a way of showing the way in which these values play out both in gender relations in and highlighting the way women are viewed. In this sense, our attempt here should be understood as an investigation. The values that we examine are those of truthfulness or truth, respect or respectfulness and industry or industriousness or hard work. The aim is to help make the case that in Igboland women are neither marginalised nor treated as inferior to men. In presenting these ideas, we draw on some proverbs (to show the values of truth and respect) and some characters and actors in Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (to demonstrate the values of respect and industry) for both men and women.

The existence of current feminist thought in Africa is tainted by colonialism. Colonial and postcolonial anthropological thought and Eurocentric scholarship have misrepresented Africa as a society where social and gender roles were largely lopsided. Hence, current feminist thought (which are largely Western) on oppression of women, subjugation and suppression were imposed on the historicity of Africans. In this article, we argue that the misrepresentations of feminism of the indigenous societal order in Africa should be ignored. We bring to the fore some ideas that advance the view that precolonial African society was not anchored on biology or ordered by gender, but was organised by age or seniority, and provided both men and women a sense of equality. Furthermore, we contend that embracing indigenous cultural values in the 21st century provides, on the one hand, a valuable tool for solutions to issues that women face currently, and, on the other hand, a viable means of detaching feminism from Eurocentric misrepresentations.

The claim that is examined in this chapter is that, as is bivalent logic, trivalent logic occupies a place in the field of logic. A trivalent logic is a three-value logical system, and a bivalent logic is a two-value logical system. As part of advancing this claim, the chapter uses the examples of trivalent logic in Charles Sanders Peirce’s thought, the trivalent logic of Janus, the Aymará trivalent logical system, and African trivalent logic. Using the example of ancestorhood, where characteristically an ancestor, as a living dead, is both a spiritual and physical entity or is considered neither a spiritual nor physical being, the overarching view or thesis that is defended and advanced is that African trivalent logic mirrors a trivalent African metaphysics or ontology.

ABSTRACT There are forms of discriminations that are not defensible, and unjustified discriminations manifest in different forms. One such manifestation is racism, which involves the use of morally arbitrary natural and moral constituents (characteristics, abilities, qualities) to demarcate racial or ethnic groups and consequently designate some groups as superior and others as inferior. In this article, I discuss one form of racism (intellectual racism), namely, racism in relation to color, as a way of highlighting how the notion of superiority and inferiority of racial or ethnic groups (Caucasian and Africans) play out in the intellectual landscape and discourse. Ultimately, my motivations are threefold: one, to signify and engage with some views of racial coloring and color eliminativism; two, to make and extend the position that color eliminativism is not defensible; and three, to highlight and emphasize the claim that given the notion of a “one-colored humanity,” racial groups ought not to be classified as superior or inferior.

Aristotle is credited with the first full-fledged robust philosophical discussion and presentation of substance. His account of substance presents different notions of substance, which were elaborated on and modified in the medieval and modern periods. Among those that elaborated on the conception of substance in the modern period are Rene Descartes, John Locke, Baruch or Benedict de Spinoza, George Berkeley, Gottfried Leibniz, David Hume, and Immanuel Kant. What is the nature of substance and how is it understood by these philosophers? In this paper I examine the notions of substance in the philosophical systems of Locke, Spinoza, and Kant. I go beyond this comparative and exploratory exercise to show why Kant takes on a more expansive notion of substance. In particular, for Kant the conceptions of substance we find in Locke and Spinoza do not allow the idea of substance to do the work that substance as a pure concept of the understanding should do.

The conventioral understanding takes God to pray a pivotal philosophical role in Descartes's epistemological project. Michael Della Rocca disagrees with this interpretation. In a recent article, " Descartes, the Cartesian Circle, and epistemology without God," he forcefully argues for the view that takes God to be peripheral and at the fringe of Descartes's account of knowledge. He argues that Descartes renders God less important in his epistemology simply in virtue of having normative certainty of clear and distinct ideas or perceptions prior to his theological argument. This paper generally argues that although it could be said that Descartes has normative certainty of some claims before his arguments for God's existence, it is misleading to claim that God plays no pivotal philosophical role in Descartes's epistemological project. In particular, it argues that since the relevant conditions for scientia for Descartes include normative certainty of clear and distinct perceptions and understanding of the metaphysical foundations of cognition it is mistaken to suppose that God takes on a less than central role in Descartes's epistemology.

In this paper I examine five essential themes in Brand Blanshard's coherence theory of truth. Blanshard defines truth in terms of the rational or the interdependence of concepts, where concepts determine objects of experience rather than merely conform to them. On this view, truth is contextual and is the approximation of thought to reality or the systemization of the two ends - the immanent and transcendent. I raise some worries for this account of truth, foremost of which is the worry that it commits us to a deep-seated skepticism, both theoretical and practical. In order to be able to tell when the immanent end is achieved and if it is making progress towards the transcendent end (i.e., when the ultimate systematization is realized), we require an omniscient standpoint of cosmic order or overarching system of beliefs. While this seems possible in principle it is not so in practice.

One of the practical ethical areas that Thaddeus Metz applied his Relational Moral Theory (RMT) to is business ethics. In this important area of applied ethics, Metz examines the question of how business owners, and related agents ought to deal with others, especially workers and consumers. He argues that the relational account of obligations recommends a stakeholder model of business and provides a plausible alternative (if not better to) familiar kinds of utilitarianism and Kantianism. In this article, I discuss and engage with this claim by raising a number of issues for RMT. For although I believe that Metz’s moral account could, in general and under certain description, be positioned as a viable competitor to utilitarianism and Kantianism, it is not clear that in certain theoretical aspects of the stakeholder account of business, it fares better than, for example, utilitarianism. Furthermore, I argue, on the one hand, that RMT should be understood as a _heterochthonous account_ of African ethics and, on the other hand, that an _autochthonous account_ of African ethics captures better or comes closer to the moral sensibilities of indigenous Africans. An _autochthonous account_ of African ethics has a different take on the issue of the stakeholder model of business and does conceptualize the business relationship in terms of needs and welfare whereby a “distant” individual may be owed more duties than a “local” individual.

This collection is about composing thought at the level of modernism and decomposing it at the postmodern level where many cocks might crow with African philosophy as a focal point. It has two parts: part one is titled 'The journey of reason in African philosophy', and part two is titled 'African philosophy and postmodern thinking'. There are seven chapters in both parts. Five of the essays are reprinted here as important selections while nine are completely new essays commissioned for this book. As their titles suggest, in part one, African philosophy is unfolded in the manifestation of reason as embedded in modern thought while in part two, it draws the effect of reason as implicated in the postmodern orientation. The idea of the book is to open new vistas for the discipline of African philosophy. African philosophy is thus presented as a disagreement discourse. Without rivalry of thoughts, Africa will settle for far less. This gives postmodernism an important place, perhaps deservedly more important than history of philosophy allocates to it. It is that philosophical moment that says 'philosophers must cease speaking like gods in their hegemonic cultural shrines and begin to converse across borders with one another'. In this conversation, the goal for African philosophers must not be to find final answers but to sustain the conversation which alone can extend human reason to its furthermost reaches.

Kwasi Wiredu proposed a democracy by consensus, inspired by the consensual practices of the traditional Akan of Africa. But his presentation of the traditional consensual practices has been criticized for inaccurateness. Helen Lauer embarks on what she sees as cleaning the debate of the misreading of Wiredu’s presentation of traditional consensual practices by his critics. This is commendable. However, we claim that she does not succeed in the task that she set out to do. We argue that her failure partly has to do with her subscribing to a one-sided assessment of such a history, which influenced the manner she evaluated the debate and some of the fallacies that crept into analysis.

As an international instrument on climate change, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change embraces a general obligation to protect the climate system, from which some specific obligations for developed countries fall off from. In this paper, I discuss three of such obligations. Firstly, the obligation to address the causes of climate change and to mitigate its adverse effects, next, the obligation to assist developing countries that are vulnerable to the adverse effects of climate change in meeting the costs of adaptation to those adverse effects and finally, the obligation to support other developing countries by providing them with appropriate resources in order for them to mitigate and adapt to the adverse effects of climate change. I show that these obligations are framed in the treaty as obligations of beneficence and suggest that the first two can be expressed as obligations of justice. I argue for the soundness of expressing the obligations this way and that doing so may have the added virtue of addressing both the egoistic and performance problems since it introduces some incentive for taking the obligations seriously and the possibility for their realization.

In this chapter, I begin the first attempt at mapping out what I consider to be the one concept of African ethics and some of its many accounts. I take the one concept of African ethics to be the general idea or notion of African morality and the many accounts to be narrations or versions that try to flesh out this concept. Regarding the one concept of African ethics, I suggest that constitutive of it or characteristic of it is communal flourishing. Taking Ubuntu, Ujamaa, and Ukama as representatives of the many accounts of African ethics, I highlight the sense in which they constitute developments or narrations of the general notion of communal flourishing.