This book sets up a rich intercultural dialogue between the philosophy of Immanuel Kant and Michel Foucault, and that of key African thinkers such as Kwame Anthony Appiah, Achille Mbembe, Kwasi Wiredu, Kwame Gyekye, Tsenay Serequeberhahn, and Henry Odera Oruka. The book challenges western-centric visions of an African future by demonstrating the richness of thought that can be found in African and Afrodiasporic philosophy. The book first shows how thinkers such as Serequeberhan have criticised the inconsistencies in Kant's (...) work, whereas others such as Wiredu, Gyekye, Appiah and Mbembe also referred to his work positively and used it to develop progressive political concepts such as the metanational state; partial cosmopolitanism and Afropolitanism. The book goes on to consider how Mbembe and Mudimbe have responded to Foucault's ideas in deciphering the various Western, African and Afrodiasporic discourses of knowledge on Africa. The book concludes by considering various theories of intercultural exchange, from Gyekye's cultural borrowing, to Appiah's conversation across boundaries, Wiredu's cross cultural dialogue, Mbembe's thinking outside the frame, Serequeberhan's dialogue at a distance, and Oruka's call for global re-distribution and a new ecophilosophical attitude to safeguard human existence on the planet. This book invites us all to engage in intercultural dialogue and mutual respect for different cultural creations. It will be an important read for researchers in Philosophy wherever they are in the world. (shrink)

The focus of the article is to explore the possibilities of philosophic discourse in the present postcolonial African situation. As indicated in the title, it will begin by exploring and laying out grosso modo, the character of philosophy as a discipline. It will then engage in examining, again broadly, Africa’s present: the situation that has prevailed since the end of formal colonialism. Consequent on the two expositive presentations, the article will then indicate the role that philosophy can and should play (...) in this situation. The aim is to explore the possible beyond the demise of colonialism in the hope of catching sight of a truly postcolonial future. The article is thus a concise articulation of the hermeneutical stance in contemporary African philosophy. (shrink)

Hermeneutics is a crucial but neglected perspective in African philosophy. Here, Tsenay Serequeberhan engages post-colonial African literature and the ideas of the African liberation struggle with critically-used insights from the European philosophical tradition. Continuing the work of Theophilus Okere and Okonda Okolo, this book attempts to overcome the debate between ethnophilosophy and professional philosophy, demonstrating that the promise of African philosophy lies with the critical development of the African hermeneutical perspective.

This chapter contains sections titled: Frantz Fanon Amilcar Cabrai Conclusion.

Explores overlapping concerns and themes in African and continental philosophy. In Existence and Heritage, Tsenay Serequeberhan examines what the European philosophical tradition has to offer when encountered from the outsider perspective of postcolonial African thought. He reads Kant in the context of contemporary international relations, finds in Gadamer’s work a way of conceiving relations among differing traditions, and explores Heidegger’s analysis of existence as it converges with Marx’s critique of alienation. In the confluence of these different assessments, Serequeberhan articulates (...) both a need and example of responding to Fanon’s call for a new kind of thinking in philosophy. He demonstrates both how continental philosophy can be a useful resource for theorizing Africa’s postcolonial condition and how postcolonial thought and African philosophy can provide a new way of approaching and understanding the Western tradition. (shrink)

The basic concern of the paper is to state what the practice of African Philosophy is and should be in view of the contemporary dismal situation of postcolonial Africa. The attempt is to articulate a conception of African philosophy as a critical un-packing of the ideas and conceptions that legitimated European expansion and to this day–having been internalized by the Westernized African elite–sanction Western hegemony. And so, along with the critique of Eurocentrism the paper explores what it means to “return (...) to the source” and to reclaim our “generic human identity.” The aim, in all of this, is to articulate a conception of African philosophy as a critical and combative hermeneutics of the contemporary African situation. (shrink)

In this compelling and engaging work, Tsenay Serequeberhan discusses recent themes in African-American and African Philosophy from a hermeneutical perspective, while paying special attention to the question of how we relate to our past and the open possibilities of our future. Our Heritage carefully examines the variety of approaches to African philosophy and argues for a historically engaged and existentially attuned paradigm shift. The result is an approach that explores the contemporary situation of African and African-American existence in view (...) of emancipatory struggles that have established the confines of the present. (shrink)

Tsenay Serequeberhan’s hermeneutics has been crucial to the development of African philosophy. Initially employed as a pathway through the ethno- and professional philosophical debates, scholars have engaged how Serequeberhan’s hermeneutics grapples with one’s own place within a socio-historical world in service of liberation/self-determination. However, this scholarship mainly has focused on his adaptation of Gadamer’s ‘effective-historical consciousness’ for his own concept of heritage. This consequently leaves his concept of a ‘lived existence’ – which is equally crucial – under-examined. This paper (...) probes what a ‘lived existence’ entails and its essentiality when explicating how one even begins to authentically think, which is the groundwork to Serequeberhan’s hermeneutics. This deepens why his concept of heritage matters as a starting point for self-determination. Addressing this lacuna, this article asks, where does philosophy begin and where should it go, particularly when rationality has been historically denied? Serequeberhan’s point of departure to answer this question proposes Heidegger’s concept of thinking itself to arrive at a notion of existence; contrariwise to most African scholars who employ a Sartrean existentialism via Frantz Fanon. As such, this paper gives an in-depth exploration of Serequeberhan’s initial reading of Heidegger, and then unfolds how he appropriates Heidegger to craft his notion of ‘lived existence’. The upshot this is twofold: First, a broader understanding of Serequeberhan’s project, its non-existentialist view of existence; Second, it describes how he specifically tailors his ‘lived existence’ to undergird his hermeneutical approach to heritage as a prescriptive, activist project which dynamically addresses the postcolonial situation. (shrink)

This review article puts two recent publications —Existence and Heritage: Hermeneutic Explorations in African and Continental Philosophies by Tsenay Serequeberhan and What Fanon Said. A Philosophical Introduction to His Life and Thought by Lewis R. Gordon—in conversation with Achille Mbembe’s renowned On the Postcolony, first published in French in 2000, in English in 2001, and here reviewed in the 2015 Wits University Press edition. The opportunity for such a literary dialogue to take place across fifteen years is occasioned both (...) by the latest South African edition of On the Postcolony, which in itself invites a fresh reading of Mbembe’s manifesto on postcolonial authoritarianism in Africa, as well as by the different potential outcome of the postcolonial condition that Gordon and Serequeberhan envision and propose with respect to Mbembe. I argue that while Mbembe’s pessimistic portrayal of the postcolonial present is one whereby it is difficult to envision transformation, both Serequeberhan and Gordon’s books offer a rich philosophical terrain from which to imagine possible futures, grounded in notions of dialogue and solidarity, that, however, vary significantly for each author. (shrink)

The following pages engage a hermeneutic approach to African philosophy, focusing on the work of Tsenay Serequeberhan. At the heart of the discussion is the question of where to locate such an approach in the existing philosophical literature. Does this way of working render African philosophy a European enterprise? Giving an affirmative response, the writings of Paulin Hountondji, which draw upon Husserlian phenomenology, are taken up as an alternative response to questions raised here about the meaning and methods of (...) hermeneutics. Ultimately, however, this perspective is also set aside. Instead, suggestions are put forward for the markers around which a contemporary African metaphysics, which is both restorative and creative, might be pursued. (shrink)

Phenomenology is an emerging field within the broader domain of African and Africana philosophy. The phenomenological method, with its various approaches to studying the meaning of lived experience, is at the core of the thought of African philosophers such as Paulin Hountondji, Dismas A. Masolo, Achille Mbembe, Mabogo More, Tsenay Serequeberhan, Noel Chabani Manganyi, and proponents of Africana Philosophy such as WEB Du Bois, Frantz Fanon, Lucius Outlaw, Lewis Gordon, George Yancy, and Linda Martin Alcoff. Technically, the term “African (...) phenomenology” is not used as widely, or introduced as systematically, as Africana phenomenology. The aim of this chapter is to introduce some of the central issues and theorists of the field of African phenomenology. As the subtitle of this chapter indicates, its scope is limited to what one may call introductory perspectives in African phenomenology. The idea is to outline for further investigation some thematically related contributions to African phenomenology with specific reference to the grounding work of Paulin Hountondji as related to works of Kwasi Wiredu and Dismas A. Masolo. Hountondji’s critical adoption of Husserl’s classic phenomenological approach offers a broad, foundational scope, which makes it particularly suitable for a basic introduction to African phenomenology. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to re-examine the hermeneutic in the ongoing discourse on methodology in African philosophy. The diverse understanding of hermeneutics is not only limited to Western philosophy; in the few decades of its history in African philosophy, hermeneutics has also assumed different meanings. This paper discusses not only the historical evolution and development of hermeneutists in the West, but also the African hermeneutists: Tsenay Serequeberhan, Okonda Okolo, Sophie Oluwole, Raphael Madu, and Bruce Janz. Through a (...) comparative critical inquisition on the strengths and the problems involved in the conceptions of hermeneutics by these African philosophers, this paper argues that basic to hermeneutics is dialogue and its proclivity towards intercultural understanding. Keywords : Hermeneutics, African philosophy, intercultural understanding, Oral tradition. (shrink)