Transforming the African philosophical place through conversations: An inquiry into the Global Expansion of Thought (GET)

Abstract

It is now clear that the development in African philosophy in the last forty years or so has been in the area of metaphilosophy, the central focus of which has been on whether African philosophy is a pure philosophy. A sizeable chunk of this engagement was manifestly perverse, leaving little or no room for phenomenological discourses. In recent times, some African philosophers have begun agitating for a shift from metaphilosophy to theoretic and applied philosophy. In the spirit of substantive inquiries in African philosophy, conversational philosophy is articulated as one of the new schools of thought in this contemporary period. This shift requires African philosophy to define its place among the world's philosophical traditions and to find new conversations both in place (substantive issues that trouble the postcolonial African life-world) and in space (comparative and intercultural engagements with other philosophical traditions on issues of mutual concern). The aim of this essay is to present African philosophy as a respectable place riding on the crest of conversations, and to demonstrate how this particular place could be transformed into a universal space of comparative thought through conversational method. The overall idea would be to establish that the goal of reason is squarely the global expansion of thought or that the journey of ‘reason’ which begins from the philosophical place is a continuous striving toward the universal space where intercultural engagement—the very hallmark of comparative thought—is unveiled as the ultimate destination of ‘reason’. At this comparative level, varying philosophical places struggle through what Wilson Moses calls ‘creative conflict’ to unravel their similarities and areas of contrast and identify and possibly contest their differences in the light of universal tools of thought. Our methods in this essay shall be critical, evaluative and prescriptive.