How does one grasp the interrelationships between the contributions to various disciplines of such a scholar as Toyin Falola, beginning from his discipline of primary academic training, history?
The example of the German philosopher George Wilhelm Frederich Hegel is useful.
I am not aware of Falola developing a philosophy of history like Hegel did, but then my exposure to Falola's massive oeuvre can be described as still embryonic.
I am also not aware of Falola developing a philosophy correlating mind and cosmos as Hegel has done.
But then, Falola's publications continue to emerge relentlessly.
Falola's thinking is systematic, but to what degree? It is certainly not that of a system builder like the German thinker, constructing an edifice of concepts trying to construct a model of the cosmos.
Falola's philosophical thinking looks to me as more that of an episodic thinker, a guerrilla philosopher, making brief but recurrent and incisive forays into issues of fundamental meaning, summations of life's value, from within the context of African histories and cultures, not aspiring to the universal vision that drives thinkers like Hegel, aspirations that have become suspect in the wake of decolonization and associated sensitivities to the imperialistic cultural and related political impositions of such efforts to speak for the entire world from the corner of Europe represented by a Hegelian location in space and time yet ranging across the cosmos, an ambition deeply human and yet reflecting the divine in its cosmological aspiration, at times hubristic, as in such aspirants mistaking their prejudices for universally valid insight.
At the same time though, the Hegelian example could help in trying to weave together Falola's vast oeuvre.
Falola is deeply committed to the philosophies and arts of his Yoruba ancestry, as demonstrated by his various books and by his work as a poet in Yoruba, the latter evident in his In Praise of Greatness.
Are there any elements of these philosophies, spiritualities and arts that could help tease unifying orientations from his work?
I don't see Falola as creating his publication trajectory with such underlying thematics in mind. But, among various approaches possible to his oeuvre, could it not be helpful, in a non-dogmatic, exploratory, heuristic and perhaps provisional manner, to ask questions, about, for example, if ideas from Yoruba thought and perhaps other African thought, about being and becoming, ontology and change, can help one unify his writings across disciplines, not to impose such ideas on them, but to help correlate them as one way of seeing his work as telling a story from different vantage points, the story of the African experience as perceived through various disciplines?
Stories.
What image of the historian and scholar best describes Falola's work?
What light may this body of work throw on ideas of relationships between reason and imagination, two strategic tools of the historian, ideally held in discriminating, critical balance?
In fact, in seeking to tell history and explore its meaning, to what degree does the historian differ from the African griot or the literary epic artist, weaving various levels of fact and fiction into a coherent whole?
Just thinking.
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