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. While part one strikes at what V. Y. Mudimbe calls the "colonising structure" or the Greco-European logo-phallo-euro-centricism in thought, part two bashes the excesses of modernism and partly valorises postmodernism. In some chapters, modernism is presented as an intellectual version of communalism characterised by the cliché 'our people say'. Our thinking is that the voice of reason is not the voice of the people but the voice of an individual.
The idea of this 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.
Author Biography:
Jonathan O. Chimakonam Ph.D, is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Calabar, Nigeria and a Research Fellow at the University of Pretoria, South Africa. His teaching and research interests include: African Philosophy, Logic, Feminism, Environmental Ethics, Postcolonial thought. He aims to break new grounds in African philosophy and Systems of Thought. He is the convener of the African Philosophy Circle, The Conversational School of Philosophy (CSP) and a winner of Jens Jacobsen Research Award for Outstanding Research in Philosophy presented by the International Society for Universal Dialogue conferred at the Polish Academy of Sciences, University of Warsaw, Poland (July, 2016). He is African philosophy Area Editor in the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. He propounded the theories of Conversational thinking and Ezumezu Logic. Chimakonam has published widely in learned international journals and has given several international conference lectures. Edwin E. Etieyibo is an Associate Professor and teaches philosophy at the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa. He had previously taught at the University of Alberta and Athabasca University, Canada before moving to the University of the Witwatersrand in 2012. His PhD (from the University of Alberta) was on David Gauthier's Moral Contractarianism and the Problem of Secession, which presents a critical examination of Gauthier's account of morality that links rationality with preferences explained by expected utility. He specializes in ethics, social and political philosophy, African philosophy, social contract theories/and history of, and has broad teaching and research interests and competence in history of philosophy, epistemology, early modern philosophy, Descartes, philosophy of law, applied ethics, African socio-political economy, philosophy of education and with children. He is the co-author (with Odirn Omiegbe) of Disabilities in Nigeria: Attitudes, Reactions, and Remediation (2017, Hamilton Books); guest editor of the South African Journal of Philosophy special issue on "Africanising the Philosophy Curriculum in Universities in Africa;" the editor of Perspectives in Social Contract Theory (2018, CRVP); Decolonisation, Africanisation and the Philosophy Curriculum (2018, Routledge); and Methods, Substance and the Future of African Philosophy (2018, Palgrave Macmillan).
