Summary
- Topic Lecture — AMO LECTURE 2023 with Olufemi Taiwo
- When May 23, 2023 from (Europe/Berlin / UTC200)
- Where hybrid (Halle/Saale & Online) — Germany
- URL https://amo-lectures.uni-halle.de/lectures/#rewriting-the-history-of-modern-philosophy
- Download date as file get iCal file
Description
Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò (Professor of African Political Thought and Chair at the Africana Studies and Research Center, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, U.S.A.)
Rewriting the History of Modern Philosophy: On Philosophy of History, Political Philosophy and Liberal Education in 19th Century West Africa
23th May 2023, 6:15 p.m. (CEST)
Online: https://mlu.de/3lrik
On site: Hörsaal IV, Ludwig-Wucherer-Str. 2, 06108 Halle (Saale), Germany
Abstract: In recent work, I have been concerned to reinscribe into the history of modern philosophy the contributions of those I have styled "excluded moderns" from the African corner of the intellectual globe. This lecture, contrary to the bastard periodization that dominates the historiography of African ideas, presents evidence of philosophy of a standardly modern variety being done in West Africa in the 19th century that could not answer to the problematic categories of "traditional" or "precolonial" African philosophy. I introduce three thinkers who lived and worked in West Africa during the period whose ideas belong in the annals of modern philosophy. I look at the works of James Africanus Beale Horton, Alexander Crummell, and Edward Wilmot Blyden focusing specifically on their philosophy of history, political philosophy, and philosophy of education. It is time the narratives of the history of modern philosophy took seriously the essential hybridity that defines it. The continuing failure to do so makes it impossible for honest teachers of philosophy to deliver its history and register truthfully the biographies of its contributors located in a particular neck of the global woods—West Africa.
Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò is Professor of African Political Thought and current Chair at the Africana Studies and Research Center, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, U.S.A. His research interests include Philosophy of Law, Social and Political Philosophy, Marxism, and African and Africana Philosophy. Táíwò is the author of Legal Naturalism: A Marxist Theory of Law (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996; Paperback 2015), (Chinese Translation, 2013); How Colonialism Preempted Modernity in Africa (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010); Africa Must Be Modern: A Manifesto (Ibadan: Bookcraft, 2012), (North American Edition, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014), Can a Liberal Be a Chief? Can a Chief Be a Liberal? On an Unfinished Business of Colonialism (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2021), and Against Decolonisation: Taking African Agency Seriously (London: Hurst, 2022). He was joint editor with Olutoyin Mejiuni and Patricia Cranton of Measuring and Analyzing Informal Learning in the Digital Age (Hershey, PA: IGI Global, 2015). His writings have been translated into French, Italian, German, Chinese, and Portuguese. He has taught at universities in Canada, Nigeria, Germany, South Korea, and Jamaica.
