Course Descriptions

This course will provide an overview of the central figures and topics in African Philosophy, offering a survey that aims to enable people to teach African Philosophy courses of their own in the future, as well as providing entry points to a range of interesting philosophical topics and figures that have been unduly neglected.  We will start with Ancient Egyptian philosophy (looking particularly at the early ethical/political "instructions" literature, such as the ); move then to Zera Yacob (a 17^th century Ethiopian philosopher who wrote a fascinating, powerful rationalist text concerning philosophy of religion and epistemology, the Hatata, or did he?); shift to the early "ethnophilosophy" work in the late 19^th and early 20^th century (Bantu Philosophy, Conversations with Ogotomelli) and Paulin Hountondji's powerful response to that work; look at work focused on "ordinary language" philosophy with African languages (Barry Hallen and Olubi Sodipo's work on Yoruba epistemological, moral, and aesthetic concepts, Kwame Gyekye's work on Akan philosophy of mind); read H. Odera Oruka's work on "sage philosophy"; and conclude by looking at contemporary African social and political philosophy, including Nkiru Nzegwu's work on Igbo matriarchal and dual-sex governance systems, Julius Nyerere's work on ujamaa, Kwesi Wiredu's work on consensus democracy, Amílcar Cabral's work on Pan-Africanism and post-colonialism, and Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò's work on colonization and decolonization, among other things.  There will also be a healthy (but not overwhelming) amount of meta-philosophical discussion: what is philosophy, what forms can it take, when does it make sense to group certain philosophical texts and figures together, why has the philosophical canon not included this work, etc.  This course can count either for the history requirement or the value theory requirement.