USA Africa Dialogue Series - CSP Event: Overcoming the Challenges of System Building

Dear Colleagues,

 

Please find attached the program of an upcoming event of the Conversational School of Philosophy on the “Overcoming the Challenges of System Building”:

 

Within the first two years of the present century, a new wave of criticism greeted African philosophy

– that it is an exercise in ‘copycatism’ and transliteration of Western philosophy.

These ascriptions have come from the Western intercultural scholars Jurgen Hengelbrock

and Heinz Kimmerle. On first showing, the ascription of Hengelbrock and Kimmerle may

seem trivial and passed on as an invocation of Eurocentrism, albeit in less subtle ways. However,

first, a critical consideration of their ascription reveals that they may be correct since the

third and perhaps fourth generation of African scholars have abandoned the conversational

and system building nature of African philosophy for the invitation and even imposition of

Western ideas over African themes. Second, the spirit of scholarship among the first generation

scholars of African philosophy who conversed, engaged and criticized one another is

vegetative among the present crop of African scholars. Third, the tendency in some African

tertiary institutions where it is rife, the understanding that it is impossible for non-Africans to

do original African philosophy poses as another militating factor that has stalked the conversational

and system building character of philosophy. Finally, the “I did it first mentality”

which is synonymous with some of the first and second generation of African scholars has

left so much ideas as foundations for systems that have failed to be erected. For instance,

Sophie Oluwole, who speaks of “Binary Complementarity” for the first time in a 2014 book

publication, fails to mention, acknowledge, engage or converse with Innocent Asouzu who

has been brainstorming and publishing copiously on the subject decades hitherto. Incidentally,

such a mentality is now replete among the third and fourth generation of African scholars,

and this dangerous trend needs to be reversed earnestly. It is a consequence of these

salient observations and to salvage African philosophy from the question of originality and

contribution to world intellectual heritage that the present webinar has been proposed.

 

PANELISTS:

Professor Simphiwe Sesanti

University of Western Cape, South Africa.

(Regionalisation and Racialization in Contemporary African Philosophy)

 

Amara Esther Ani

Doctoral Resarch Student, University of Johannesburg, South Africa.

(Contemporary African Philosophers and the Urgency for Interchange and System Building)

 

Dr Bjoern Freter,

Independent Scholar, Knoxville, USA.

(Epistemic Marginalisation and the Task of Contemporary African Philosophers)

 

MEETING ID: 851 3021 2634

KENCODE/PASSWORD: 774042

https://us02web.zoom.us/j/85130212634?pwd=MmRxZlAxZ3JXWDRBMWcwRWp0a2tjQT09  

 

All the best!
Bjoern