Book Title: African Philosophy: Reflections on Yoruba Metaphysics and Jurisprudence Book Author: Oladele Abiodun Balogun Publisher: Xcel Publishers. Pages: 387. Year of Publication: 2018.

The central theses of Oduwole are: first, that Olodumare cannot be exonerated from the philosophical problem of evil for He possesses similar attributes to the theistic God in Judeo-Christian tradition; and second, that the Yoruba hold a strong dialectical principle of Ire and Ibi in their daily world encounters. This paper challenges these positions as inaccurate representations of the Yoruba African understanding of the nature of evil. It exposes the conceptual errors that fraught Oduwole’s paper and provides further (...) rigorous analytical expositions of the nature of evil in Yoruba-African philosophical thought. (shrink)

The age-old philosophical problem of evil, especially prominent in Western philosophy, as resulting from the intellectual irreconcilability of some appellations of God with the presence of evil – indeed, of myriads of evil – in the world, has been debated upon by many African religious scholars; particularly, philosophers. These include John Mbiti, Kwasi Wiredu, Kwame Gyekye, E. B. Idowu and E.O. Oduwole. While the debate has often been about the existence or not of the problem of evil in African (...) theology, not much philosophical discussion has taken place regarding death and its implications for African conception(s) of God. This paper attempts to contribute to the discussion of those implications. It explores the evilness of death, as exemplified in the African notion of “evil death,” and argues that the phenomenon of death presents itself in complex but interesting ways that do not philosophically ground its characterization as evil. Therefore, the problem of evil would not arise in African thought on account of the phenomenon of death. (shrink)