“It” and personhood in African philosophy

Abstract

The question of the nature of “it” and the progression1 from “it” to an “it” in Ifeanyi Menkiti’s normative conception of a person has created divisions amongst philosophers in African philosophy. In this article, I attempt to offer a charitable interpretation of Menkiti’s use of an “it” to denote an individual’s life through the usage of epistemological and ontological tools to assess the individual’s performance. In doing so, I argue that a better account of the progression is from an “it” to an “it+” rather than from an “it” to an “it-it” as formulated by Edwin Etieyibo. This formulation of the nameless dead acknowledges that the latter “it” is significantly distinct from the first “it” as it possesses a number of properties that are distinct from its former “it”, with the moral force as the significant factor in its constitution. In this article, I seek to argue that accepting Etieyibo’s formulations of the latter “it” as an “it-it” risks complicating the normative account of a person conceptually.