Africana Philosophy: From Ancient Egypt to the Nineteenth Century by Peter Adamson and Chike Jeffers

Expand

Africana Philosophy: From Ancient Egypt to the Nineteenth Century by Peter Adamson and Chike Jeffers

'Africana Philosophy: From Ancient Egypt to the Nineteenth Century' by Peter Adamson and Chike Jeffers

Africa is a big continent and a big concept. Nearly 3,000 languages are native to Africa, not counting the English, French and other tongues brought by colonizers. Africa includes more than 50 nations with borders that don’t always conform to the traditional lands of indigenous groups. And then there is the African diaspora, not a homogenous entity either. Can anyone reasonably define an “African philosophy” representing such diversity?

Peter Adamson (King’s College) and Chike Jeffers (Dalhousie University) are well aware of the challenges in their monumental overview, Africana Philosophy. “The breadth of the project may give rise to a worry that our definition [of Africa? Of philosophy?] is too capacious, that we are not telling a single story but many unrelated ones,” they concede. Africana Philosophy is a compendious argument against any one-way approach to categorizing ideas. Frederick Douglass could be situated in American social thought as well as an investigation into the social thought of Africa’s descendants. Was he also a philosopher?

Adamson and Jeffers approach the subject with a view more in keeping with the ancient Greeks than the modern schools of post-this and that. Philosophy is fundamentally about how to live a good life—and then about how to reflect on it. Africana Philosophy gathers its material from across the continent and the New World, from oral folk sages, the manuscripts of Islamic, Ethiopian Orthodox and Masonic authors as well as the work of professional ethnologists and philosophers. Many of the ideas presented in Africana Philosophy could also be housed in a book called Africana Theology. In recent centuries, African philosophers have used the Western canon of Hegel, Kant and company, a lineage built on Aristotle and Plato, to understand the particular situation of their own history.

Africana Philosophy contains a multitude of sources from across the millennia, from the pharaohs through W.E.B. DuBois (a second volume is planned). Every culture surveyed produced an ethical code, maxims, and many sound like Socrates as recorded by Plato. “Don’t be proud of your knowledge, consult the ignorant and the wise,” wrote Ptahhotep c. 2,500 BCE. The pharaonic vizier predated Plato, but classical Greek philosophy later made its way deep into the continent in the Christian writings of Ethiopia and the Islamic texts brought by missionaries into sub-Saharan Africa. Among many other tangents, Adamson and Jeffers address ubuntu, a Zulu word for a communitarian ethic that 20th century Kenyan philosopher John Mbiti archly described, referencing Descartes, as “I am because we are.” South African Bishop Desmond Tutu applied ubuntu to his Truth and Reconciliation Commission, shepherding the transition from apartheid to multiracial democracy. For Tutu, apartheid dehumanized the oppressors as well as the oppressed.

Adams and Jeffers’ writing is refreshingly free of academic jargon and pseudo-intellectual lingo. Their book is the latest in a series called “A History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps” whose previous volumes include Byzantium and India. The project grew out of their “History of Philosophy” podcast, another indicator that some of the freshest intellectual thinking is occurring outside university conference rooms.

Buy Africana Philosophy on Amazon here.

Paid link