Jonathan Egid

This article reconstructs the central doctrine of the Ḥatäta Zär’a Yaʿǝqob by analyzing the faculty of ləbbuna, a term variously translated as ‘reason,’ ‘understanding,’ ‘conscience,’ or ‘heart.’ I first reconstruct the Ḥatäta’s core problem: perspective-relative justification in religious disagreement, against the seventeenth-century backdrop of interconfessional conflict in the Ethiopian highlands. I then offer a systematic account of ləbbuna as an anti-relativistic solution to this problem. I show how ləbbuna functions as a universal, divinely-endowed capacity for discerning the śərʿatä fəṭrät (the established order of creation), thereby providing an independent standard for judgement. I identify six defining features of ləbbuna: its independence from any haymanot or ‘creed’; its grounding in a metaphysical harmony between creation, the Creator and human minds; its divine origin; its ethical-epistemic unity; its immediacy and conditional infallibility; and its arduousness. I conclude by clarifying what is (and is not) at stake in describing Zär’a Yaʿǝqob as a rationalist.

This article uses new archival evidence to reframe the controversy over the authorship of the Ḥatäta Zärʾa Yaʿǝqob (also known as the Wärqe ), a philosophical autobiography set in seventeenth-century Ethiopia. We demonstrate that, already in the context of the Catholic mission to evangelize the Oromo people of southern Ethiopia, accusations were made against a Capuchin missionary, Fr. Giusto da Urbino (1814–56), to the effect that he had endorsed, edited, or even forged this work. Catholic authorities promptly attempted to suppress the Ḥatäta Zärʾa Yaʿǝqob, identified in an 1857 report as a “true Lucretius of Ethiopian literature.”

A growing consensus holds that the history of philosophy must move beyond its traditional parochialism, yet there has been less clarity about what non-Eurocentric histories that do not reproduce inherited exclusions might look like. One influential alternative is ‘comparative philosophy’, which David Wong characterises as ‘bringing together’ traditions that developed in ‘relative isolation’ and are defined along “regional and cultural lines”. I argue that this framework faces three persistent difficulties – speculation, incommensurability, and geopolitical categorisation – illustrating these problems through the frequently-invoked comparison between René Descartes and Zera Yacob. I argue that these difficulties not only obscure what is philosophically distinctive about each thinker but also hinder our ability to place both within a unified, global narrative of seventeenth-century philosophy. I propose instead a ‘connected history of philosophy’: an approach that centres on tracing concrete material and linguistic connections between thinkers and intellectual milieux. This approach, I suggest, provides a more historically grounded basis for comparison, illuminates the philosophical parallels between Descartes and Zera Yacob, and enables both to be located within the emerging global networks of seventeenth-century intellectual exchange. I conclude by outlining how connected histories can lay foundations for a genuinely global account of early modern philosophy.

The Ḥatäta Zärʾa Yaʿǝqob and the Ḥatäta Wäldä Ḥəywät are enigmatic and controversial works. Respectively an autobiography and a companion treatise by a disciple, they are composed in the Gǝʿǝz language and set in the highlands of Ethiopia during the seventeenth century. Expressed in prose of great power and beauty, they bear witness to pivotal events in Ethiopian history and develop a philosophical system of considerable depth. However, they have also been condemned by some as a forgery, an elaborate mystification successful in deceiving generations of European and Ethiopian scholars. This volume breaks new ground for the study of these texts, presenting a clear account of the most up-to-date scholarship the ways they works are being investigated by contemporary philosophers, philologists, and historians. While the authorship question is addressed in the volume, it is not the sole locus of discussion. The near-exclusive focus on this question over the last century has obscured scholarly interest in the texts’ philosophical and literary qualities in their own right. Accordingly, this volume begins to fill this gap, exploring the texts' implications for the global history of philosophy and transnational intellectual history of the 17th century.

This introduction aims to contextualise the contributions to this edited volume by providing an overview of the Ḥatäta Zär’a Ya‛ǝqob and its companion text, the Ḥatäta Wäldä Həywät: the manuscripts which contain them, the narrative of the texts themselves, the historical context of their setting, the circumstances of their composition and discovery, and the controversy over their authorship. I begin with a description of the manuscripts themselves and the context of their “discovery” in the middle of the nineteenth century as part of Catholic missionary activity in the Horn of Africa. I then turn to the historical background of the setting of the Ḥatätas in the Ethiopian Empire of the seventeenth century, in particular the political and religious conflict that forms its essential narrative context and provokes its philosophical reflections: the invasion of the Ethiopian Empire by the Adal Sultanate, the conversion of Emperor Susənyos to Catholicism and the resulting civil war, the accession of Fasilädäs, and the restoration of Orthodoxy. I examine how these political events shaped the life of the protagonist of the Ḥatäta Zär’a Ya‛ǝqob and influenced the general problematic of his philosophy. The second part of the introduction turns to the reception history of the text. I divide this history into five periods: Discovery to Catalogue (1854-1859); Catalogue to Edition (1859-1904); Edition to Refutation (1904-1920); Refutation to Rehabilitation (1920-1976); and Limbo (1976-present), each of which traces the development of original arguments on the authorship question and outlines the cultural politics in the background of these arguments. I then reflect on the state of the debate in contemporary Ethiopia and Euro-American academia. A final section concludes the introduction by briefly considering the philosophical significance of the Ḥatätas and the debate concerning their authorship.

The Ḥatäta Zärʾa Yaʿǝqob and Ḥatäta Wäldä Həywät are two remarkable works of philosophy that were until recently virtually unknown to philosophers outside Ethiopia. The first is a philosophical autobiography narrated by the eponymous Zärʾa Yaʿǝqob, a scholar from Aksum in northern Ethiopia, exiled from his home country and forced to take refuge in a mountain cave, where he develops a philosophical system that encompasses a metaphysics of creation, an analysis of the relation between the divine and the human, an account of both epistemology and ethics grounded in the faculty of ləbbuna or ‘reason’, and a strident critique of contemporary social norms. The second text is a much longer companion treatise written by his disciple Wäldä Həywät, and develops the arguments and ideas of Zärʾa Yaʿǝqob into a systematic social ethics. These works, essentially unexamined by philosophers before the past decade, have enjoyed a certain notoriety within the field of Ethiopian-Semitic philology, on account of a century-long controversy concerning their authorship.

In 2017, the Australasian Journal of Philosophy issued a rare retraction, informing their readers that one of their articles was not in fact written by a cat. The short article, a critique of David Lewis’s ‘Veridical Hallucination and Prosthetic Vision’, was published in 1981 under the name of ‘Bruce Le Catt’, a figure with no discernible institutional affiliation or track record of publishing, but who appears to have been familiar with Lewis’s work. As indeed he might have been, being the beloved pet of the great American philosopher. It may not have come as a surprise to those familiar with Lewis’s work that ‘Bruce Le Catt’ was not the pseudonym of an astute critic, but of Lewis himself. The playfulness of Lewis’s writing is well known: for instance, the paper ‘Holes’ (1970), co-written with Stephanie Lewis, is a dialogue between two characters, ‘Argle’ and ‘Bargle’, on the ontological status of holes as found in Gruyère, crackers, paper-towel rollers and in matter more generally. Nevertheless, the attribution of the 1981 paper to a cat seemed to cross a line. It may have been playful, but it was also deceptive, hence the retraction. Lewis was not the only 20th-century philosopher to publish using an invented persona. The contents page of the book Explaining Emotions (1980), edited by Amélie Oksenberg Rorty, features the essay ‘Jealousy, Attention, and Loss’ by one Leila Tov-Ruach, listed on the Contributors page as ‘an Israeli psychiatrist, who writes and lectures on philosophic psychology’. Some readers might have noticed that this is a rather unusual name – a pun on laila tov ruach or ‘goodnight wind’ in Hebrew – and might have had their suspicions confirmed by the fact that there is no discernible trace of this psychiatrist elsewhere on the medical or academic record. Indeed, as an erratum on the University of California Press website drily notes, Amélie Oksenberg Rorty and Leila Tov-Ruach are indeed one and the same person.

How does philosophy learn to speak a new language? That is, how does some particular language come to serve as the means for the expression of philosophical ideas? In this paper, I present an answer grounded in four historical case studies and suggest that this answer has broad implications for contemporary philosophy. I begin with Jonathan Rée’s account of philosophical translation into English in the sixteenth century, and the debate between philosopher-translators who wanted to acquire – wholesale or with modifications – foreign terms, and those who wished to take existing words and transform them from their ordinary to a philosophical use. I sketch how these twin processes of ‘acquisition’ and ‘transformation’ manifested themselves in philosophical translations from Greek to Latin, Greek to Arabic and both Greek and Arabic to Gə’əz and argue that comparative work in this vein could yield interesting and significant results. I suggest that not only is Rée’s approach useful for thinking about philosophical translation historically, but that philosophical translation between very different languages is important for contemporary philosophy insofar as it reveals the linguistic presuppositions of philosophical theories expressed in some particular language, and that this constitutes an argument against the prevailing monolingualism in philosophy.

This article explores an episode in the reception of Hegel's philosophy of history and historiography of philosophy with reference to the question of the possibility of non-Western philosophy, in particular African philosophy. Section I briefly outlines the contents of the Hatäta Zär'a Ya‛ǝqob and the controversy over its authorship, focusing in particular on the argument of the Ethiopianist and scholar of Semitic languages Carlo Conti Rossini that ‘rationalistic’ philosophy was impossible in Ethiopia. In section II I suggest that a major component of the intellectual background to this notion of the impossibility of philosophy in Africa can be traced to Hegel's philosophy of history. To substantiate this claim I begin by providing an account of the broader historiographical shift between 1780 and 1830, in which Africa and Asia came to be excluded from the history of philosophy, and I suggest that Hegel's philosophy of history was decisive in this process. I examine how Hegel's account of history as the realization and actualization of freedom goes together with the development of cultural production culminating in philosophy, and how both of these processes (if they are really separate processes at all), can be mapped onto particular historical-geographical populations and cultures. I suggest that, even though this was not Hegel's intention, by the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries this served as a cultural justification for political domination: those who are unfree are unfree because they are unthinking (unphilosophical), and those who are unthinking cannot be free. Finally in section III I connect this Hegelian conception to Conti Rossini's work, both his article on the Hatäta and as apologist for Italian imperialism. I conclude by reflecting on what this underexplored connection between Hegel and early twentieth-century theorists of culture might mean for attempts to construct global histories of philosophy.