First, a correction. This statement from my last post, is inaccurate:
"Falola's personal research scope and that of the network in which he is a driving force does not extend into the sciences, like that of Aristotle does".
Falola's "Ritual Archives" includes a quotation of a discussion by various scholars on Ifa as or in relation to science. Falola's more recent public lecure discuses the role of women in STEM.
It could be vital, though, to differentiate between the cultural foundations of science and science itself. Since Olu Longe's "Ifa Divination and Computer Science", a recurrent subject in Ifa Studies is the similarity between Ifa binary structure and that of computing. Does that make Ifa science or the precursor of computer technology? No, in my view. Does that make Ifa a precursor of other divinatory systems where binary structure is fundamental? No evidence to that effect, in my understanding so far. How true is it that the Western philosopher Gottfried Leibniz, learning of Chinese I Ching divination, transported its binary structure into western thought, from where it was adopted by computer science or did Leibnitz discover the Chinese system after developing his own binary principles? I don't know.
Whatever might be the facts, one needs to ask to what degree is Ifa science or like science and to what degree is such enquiry of value for Ifa and science?
On the Falola/Falola Network/Aristotle comparison, I think differently on this subject.
My earlier response was lost so I'll have to present this more formal piece that integrates what I had written earlier-
Comparing the Multidisciplinary Scholarly and Institutional Achievements of Aristotle and the Falola Network
Foundational
Falola's work in terms of his individual creativity and his transcontinental organizational network may be examined in terms of a comparison with the ancient Greek polymath and institutional innovator Aristotle as "philosopher and organizer of research", a characterization reflecting an understanding of Aristotle's foundational influence in the configuration of Western scholarship as due both to his individual genius and his capacity for interpreting, organizing and presenting the research done by others, in the context of his creating and running an institution in the terms of what is now known as a research centre.
Aristotle being paradigmatic as a particularly strategic polymathic research innovator, other research innovators, particularly polymathic figures, may be compared to their closeness to or distance from that paradigm. A reflection of the Aristotelian construction of the epistemologies and subject matter that underlie Western scholarship is suggested by Falola's "Ritual Archives" and "Pluriversalism" essays in which he argues for a rethinking of the role of classical African thought in the contemporary dominance of Western systems
in modern scholarship and education.
I invoke Aristotle in relation to Falola and the scholarly network he is central to because of the similarities between Falola's aspirations in his essay "Ritual Archives" and Aristotle's engagement in laying foundations for how knowledge may be gained, applying his exploratory strategies to possibly the entire scope of knowledge known in his time and place and developing a teaching and research institution to house and guide this activity, and according to Anthony Kenny in A History of Western Philosophy, was the first in the Western tradition to develop a study syllabus and build a research library for the use of the institution he built.
Falola's "Ritual Archives", complemented by his "Pluriversalism", is advocating a rethinking of principles of inquiry and demonstration of knowledge, derived from classical African thought and operating in harmony with the Western tradition of scholarship which Aristotle pioneered and within which Falola is working as he seeks to harness two traditions, the African and the Western, the spiritual and the secular, the visual and the verbal, the performative and the discursive, an aspiration that theoretically, subsumes the entirety of possibilities of knowledge, even as the footprints of this ambitious thinker are already present across a vast range of thought, suggesting the possibility of extending that epistemic and metaphysical rethinking to a similar encyclopedic scope, along with trying to work out the institutional contexts within which these reconfigurations may take place, this institutional exploration also evident in the "Ritual Archives" essay.
Qualification
The degree to which any scholarly initiative can foundationally rework the modes and subjects of scholarly investigation as Aristotle did at the headwaters of the Western tradition, is questionable, although not perhaps impossible as the horizon of understanding expands, necessitating new investigative foundations.
However, the multiplicity of connections between researchers in different countries working on projects to which Falola is central might be unique for an individual in the history of scholarship, as different from a traditional institution, such scope being convetionally demonstrated by institutions made up of many coordinating units and directors.
Contextualisation
I begin my comparative evaluation of Falola and the Falola Network from Aristotle and the Western tradition he initiated rather than from African examples where polymathic learning is evident, such as the Yoruba Ifa and the Ghanaian Adinkra, encyclopedic encapsulations of knowledge, paradigms of efforts to integrate what is known in the quest for what can be known, or from the Arab and Persian worlds, where the culture of the scholarly polymath may have emerged with such thinkers as the philosopher and medical researcher Ibn Sina before it did in the Renaissance West, which crystallized the culture in the concept of the uomo universali, the universal man, because the Aristotelian example combines a range of possibilities closer to Falola's achievement and aspirations than those others.
Falola is a scholar trained in and operating within the tradition of which Aristotle is foundational. The techniques of logic, of rhetoric, of disciplinary organization, pioneered by Aristotle, are the same cognitive systems in terms of which Falola has been trained and within which he principally works, and from within which he is advocating a rethinking of these foundations, not in a wholesale return to the classical African systems he references but in terms of a complementarity between both cognitive cultures.
The relationship between these polymathic figures, Aristotle and Falola, is one of partnership, of resonance, of confluence, not conflict. One may appreciate and draw from the achievements of various cultures, appreciating difference while seeking profounder perceptions of unity.
Grounding in Global Cognitive History
One may view this subject in the light of a global and pan-historical grasp of the world of human creativity, from prehistory to the present, a Hegelian kind of aspiration, but in terms of a broader scope of exploration. Along those lines, one could explore the various ways that people have structured the quest for knowledge as a primary human need.
While addressing the social contexts of these structurations and the various uses to which these efforts have been put, one could be principally interested in the global configuration actualized by various cognitive processes and systems across space and time, the network of possibilities they dramatize.
In that context, one can identify with Aristotle as a paradigmatic thinker and institution builder without needing to contend with race centred appropriations of the Greek thinker. No thinker and body of knowledge is summative of human possibility, all of them being ultimately complementary.
The Paradigmatic Character of the Platonic-Aristotelian Achievement
At the same time, however, I think the combination of the Platonic-Aristotelian achievement points to much of the possibilities of human cognitive capacity-even though I am not deeply acquainted with either of them first hand, an inadequacy I need to address- because between them, they are able to demonstrate how one may adopt any exploratory stance, examine and justify it, while, to the best of my limited knowledge, other thinkers in various cultures are not likely to demonstrate their scope of cognitive resources-from ratiocinative thinking, to dramatic dialogue in the context of vivid social contexts and physical settings, parables and mythic narratives, to surveys of other philosophical positions to explorations across the breadth of knowledge and examinations of how these diversities may be united.
In my view, a key value of the Western system, pioneered by the Greeks and particularly by Aristotle, complemented by Plato, is the primacy of the human capacity to evaluate reality, even within the understanding that human faculties might not be capable of understanding fundamental aspects of reality, might be capable but limited, or incapable of fully grasping its scope.
Such summations are not left to the province of what the human person cannot engage with but are engaged with in terms of a comparative evaluation of human possibility and cosmic being, this being my own summation of a central picture that may be developed from the convergence of secular and religious thought in the Western tradition, a human centered but cosmologically grounded, epistemically sensitive pluralism.
The various possibilities of this focus on the empirical centre of reality in the human person have been so well developed in the Western academic context, making it a system that needs studying as an environment in which there is an opportunity somewhere to study or research practically anything, as long as one is ready to interpret and present one's studies within the broad outlines I have depicted above.
Relationality of Achievement
Does Falola need to be assessed in terms of the degree to which he achieves Aristotle's encyclopedic rethinking of the foundations of scholarship, in relation to the Western context, in the latter's case?
No, because the contemporary character of scholarship is much more complex than in Aristotle's time, the embryonic character of knowledge in the context in which he was working enabling his work to be so foundational and across such a broad span of investigations.
As it is, being able to indicate the need for rethinking of these foundations, as Falola may be seen as doing, being able to build on such a suggestion or being able to make progress in relation to such rethinking in any subject in any discipline, talk less an entire discipline, is a great leap forward on account of the distance even the Western world of learning has traveled in the centuries before and since Aristotle, the pyramidal complexity of knowledge achieved in this much farther point in time.
So, Falola and his associated scholars do not need to be said to aspire to an Aristotelian scope because the possibility of such a scope is questionable at this point in time. It exists in terms of a similarity, not an identity. That similarity itself is so huge that it's not realistic to expect any human being to operate at that level. Although it might be possible it is unlikely and is more likely to emerge as the work of various scholars working in tandem across time. Even within a multi-scholar context, it would require a careful re-examination of relationships between the biological, psychological and social conditions of the development of knowledge, as these eventuate in the epistemic frames through which understanding is reached, in the context of the human being's relationship with the metaphysical context of existence.
Various thinkers have attempted something similar but the strength and impact of their efforts is another question. Early thinkers have bequeathed us with these aspirations but achieving the kind of prominence they achieved in such foundation laying cannot really be assessed in terms of how the forerunners are assessed because once the possibility of such a cognitive achievement has been demonstrated, such an achievement henceforth in and of itself ceases to be valued in terms of such wonder and becomes more something to be admired.
Even then, such peaks of achievement, like an almost impossibly high mountain, its challenge the lure to climbing it, will continuously attract aspirants. Each person who strives towards rethinking the foundations of understanding in a subject, in a discipline, in the world of learning as whole, does it in their own way, and it's not realistic to assess Kant wholesale in terms of Aristotle or Hegel totally in terms of Kant or Aristotle, or among encyclopedic knowledge systems, Plato in terms of Ifa or both in terms of the Indian Mahabharata, even though all three of them share, in different ways, a relationship between the exploration of contrastive perspectives on the issues they explore in the context of artistic expression.
The Transcendent Inspiration of the Falola Network
What the Falola Network represents may be seen as an institution without a geographical centre- can Falola's UTexas office be seen as the centre?- without a dedicated budget stream, managed largely as a digitally coordinated, rhizomatic network, driven more by the selfless pursuit of knowledge than in terms of financial gain accruing to its members, as in economic gains academics make through publishing.
A magnificent example of scholarly possibility, in particular, and human possibility, in general, in which the central currency of influence is not monetary or any form of material profit or political power but the quest for knowledge.
The Ifa network of scholar priests from Falola's Yorubaland origins and their brethren among other African systems will be proud to see this magnification of their example of relentless cognitive quest as they traveled far and wide seeking knowledge in terms of a web of fellow devotees spread across vast distances, journeys even taken inadvertently across the terrible Middle Passage, leading to the ongoing flowering of ancient knowledge in novel forms in new lands, surviving and thriving in spite of the grim circumstances of the method of arrival.
thanks
toyin
--"Aristotle being paradigmatic as a polymathic research innovator, other research innovators, particularly polymathic figures, may be compared to their closeness to or distance from that paradigm."Adepoju
As soon as you mention Aristotle you open a can of worms.
Falola would now be judged as aspiring to, and falling short, of this Aristotleian model - all to the glory of the Eurocentric world that he and his intellectual network supposedly would have been attempting to impress, emulate and work for. The mantra, "our ancestors the Greeks," comes into play and the bizarre, narcissistic world of Euroland takes center stage.
Your concluding paragraph captures the reality.
GE
From: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju <toyin.adepoju@gmail.com>
Sent: Friday, December 14, 2018 2:22 PM
To: usaafricadialogue
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Models of Scholarship: The Falola Network, a Transnational Research and Publication System [ Edited]thanks, Gloria.
your keynote at the falola@65 conference would be priceless towards giving flesh to this characterization.
i am also seeing this ideational picture in terms of a mapping representing the structuration of African Studies and beyond enabled by the Falola Network.
what is the actualized and potential significance of the initiatives of this scholarly matrix to the interdisciplinary constitution of scholarly fields that is African Studies?
can it have, has it influence beyond this multi-disciplinary centre?
in the understanding that along with sharing front-line scholarship with scholars, others could also be educated through such sharing, i proposed a cover story on Toyin Falola to TIME magazine and one could do so again to the same international news magazine and others like Newsweek and the Economist.
such a proposal might be better appreciated if presented in a distillation of answers to such questions as i have asked above in ways the general public can readily appreciate.
one could also ask qs about the contributions of toyin falola and his network in generating ideas and initiating and driving projects that speak to deep human concerns rising from within but going beyond the arcana of disciplinary specializations.
perhaps one could reference falola's contribution to what he describes as 'brain-circulation', the cyclical motion of people, ideas and initiatives across the world, exemplified by the constellating of scholarship and scholars within and in relation to Africa from his base in the US, a response to the challenge of brain drain and the consequent de-enablement of Africa in the global knowledge space.
to what degree does this orientation reflect historical paradigms of development in relation to shifting statuses of scholarly centre and peripheries, from the earlier migration of educational ideas from Germany to the US through the presence of US citizens in German universities in the earlier centuries of the history of the US university, as described, among other sources, in The Workshop of the World, to the role in technological development around the world of returnees to their home countries to the similarities and difference between those contexts and Falola's effort to contribute to building what may be described as radiations of creative possibility by helping to nourish potentials within and in relation to his mother continent using the enablements of his presence at disciplinary and geographical centres of power.
among other ways one could interpret The Falola Network in terms of burning questions of the day, also resonant across history.
Falola's work in terms of his individual creativity and his institutional transcontinental organizational may be examined in terms of a comparison with the ancient Greek polymath and institutional innovator Aristotle as 'philosopher and organizer of research', a characterization reflecting an understanding of Aristotle's foundational influence in the configuration of Western scholarship as due both to his individual genius and his capacity for interpreting the research done by others, in the context of his creating and running an institution in the terms of what is now known as a research centre.
Aristotle being paradigmatic as a polymathic research innovator, other research innovators, particularly polymathic figures, may be compared to their closeness to or distance from that paradigm. A reflection of the Aristotelian construction of the epistemologies and subject matter that underlie Western scholarship is suggested by Falola's 'Ritual Archives' and 'Pluriversalism' essays in whuch he argues for a rethinking of the role of classical African thought in the contemporary dominance of Western systems in modern scholarship and education.
Falola's personal research scope and that of the network in which he is a driving force does not extend into the sciences, like that of Aristotle does, and the degree to which any scholarly initiative can foundationally rework the modes and subjects of scholarly investigation as Aristotle did at the headwaters of the Western tradition, is questionable, although not perhaps impossible as the horizons of understanding expand, necessitating new investigative foundations, but the multiplicity of connections between researchers in different countries working on projects to which Falola is central might be unique for an individual in the history of scholarship , as different from an institution, such scope being traditionally demonstrated by institutions made up of many coordinating units and directors.
What the Falola Network represents, therefore, may be seen as an institution without a geographical centre- can Falola's UTexas office be seen as the centre?- without a dedicated budget stream, managed largely as a digitally coordinated, rhizomatic network, driven more by the selfless pursuit of knowledge than in terms of financial gain accruing to its members, as in economic gains academics make through publishing.
A magnificent example of scholarly possibility, in particular, and human possibility, in general, in which the central currency of influence is not monetary or any form of material profit or political power but the quest for knowledge.
The Ifa network of scholar priests from Falola's Yorubaland origins and their brethren among other African systems will be proud to see this magnification of their example of relentless cognitive quest as they traveled far and wide seeking knowledge in terms of a web of fellow devotees spread across vast distances, journeys even taken inadvertently across the terrible Middle Passage, leading to the ongoing flowering of ancient knowledge in novel forms in new lands, surviving and thriving in spite of the grim circumstances of the method of arrival.
--On Thu, 13 Dec 2018 at 20:30, Emeagwali, Gloria (History) <emeagwali@ccsu.edu> wrote:
--This is good. We should also add some numbers- the number of books, scholars, book series, conferences and photos to date for the record.
Professor Gloria EmeagwaliProfessor of History
From: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju <toyin.adepoju@gmail.com>
Sent: Wednesday, December 12, 2018 9:59 PM
To: usaafricadialogue; Yoruba Affairs
Subject: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Models of Scholarship: The Falola Network, a Transnational Research and Publication System [ Edited]--Models of Scholarship
The Falola Network
a Transnational Research and Publication System
Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju
Toyin Falola
The Falola Network (TFN), a transnational research and publication system of scholars and projects, integrating scholars and publishers in various continents, is an initiative that takes to a high and possibly unprecedented level the international culture of scholarship.
It consists of individual books, book series, scholarly articles and conferences organised by Toyin Falola in collaboration with others or organised or written in relation to Toyin Falola, along with two rich Google groups organised by Falola as well as scholars inspired or enabled by Toyin Falola and the initiatives he is central to actualizing.
Toyin Falola is a scholar whose academic education is in history but whose self education and publications span practically every branch of the humanities and a large swathe of the social sciences, a scope reflected in his current appointment as the Jacob and Frances Sanger Mossiker Chair in the Humanities at the University of Texas at Austin.
The initiatives associated with Falola are increasingly growing as a defining force in scholarship on Africa across the humanities and social sciences.
Also published on Facebook
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