Philosophy of Body: Practicing Logic, Managing Diversity and Telling about that Practice and Management: the African Contribution to the Practice of Philosophy

Abstract

While in predicating and designating, quantifying and generalizing, and in numbering, English speakers use one/many figuring, Yoruba speakers do the same in whole/part as they, like their English counterparts, do the little embodied rituals (with hands, eyes, gestures) that go with these acts. Numbers as used in English and Yoruba languages reveal two systems of abstraction constructed in two diverse systems of categorization. The disparity in the two strings of abstraction is the divergence between Yoruba and English, regarding the forms of actions that bodies do, actions that are in turn coded as the language users engage in predication and designation. As a part of grammar, natural number is a historical product; an attempt at giving meaning. It has been naturalized, and is no longer seen as a social product. Establishing how the truths numbers form come into existence, Verran explains quantifying as resulting from ritualized and routinized collective embodied acting. She renders an account of generalization in the explanatory frame of “emergent worlds.” She tells of the experience of doing quantification and managing diversity in a manner that allows a “going-on together” in Yoruba classrooms, markets, and civil administration. She tells of practicing diversity and telling about that practice, a responsible communication of diversity as practicable and amenable to matters of mutual concern. She also recounts an ‘irresponsible’ doing and telling of difference (conservativist universalism and liberalist relativism), a contriving that legislates a moral order, presenting difference as undoable and unmanageable. Contemplating worlds as outcomes of reciprocally rebelling and cooperating co-players, we find explanatory frames that not only celebrate difference and sameness, and appreciate the place of the inanimate in the animate (human), but also that do not radically sever the symbolic from the material.