Souleymane Bachir Diagne

Works

• 2001Islam and Open Society: Fidelity and Movement in the Philosophy of Muhammad Iqbal

  Study of Iqbal’s Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam: Iqbal read the Qur’an as a call to movement and individuality and so opened Islamic thought to time, change and an open society; Diagne relates him to Bergson and to the reformers of his age.

• 2007African Art as Philosophy: Senghor, Bergson, and the Idea of Negritude

  Reading of Senghor through Bergson: Négritude is above all a philosophy of African art, which grasps the world through rhythm and intuition; Diagne defends Senghor against the charge of essentialism and shows how Bergson’s critique of analytic reason shaped him.

Position

Diagne is on the map as a philosopher who works across the history of logic, Islamic philosophy and African philosophy, and who has made translation a central philosophical theme. His first books dealt with George Boole’s algebra of logic. In his study of Muhammad Iqbal (Islam and Open Society, 2001) and in Comment philosopher en islam? (2008; English Open to Reason, 2018) he argued that the Islamic philosophical tradition, from the falasifa to Iqbal, is marked by a tension between fidelity to the sources and movement, and that Iqbal’s reading of the Qur’an as a call to individuality, time and change opens Islam to an open society; he connected this with Bergson, whose philosophy of time Iqbal knew. In Léopold Sédar Senghor: l’art africain comme philosophie (2007; English African Art as Philosophy, 2011) he read Négritude as a philosophy of African art, developed with Bergson’s critique of analytic reason, and defended Senghor against the charge of essentialism; he also wrote the SEP entry on Négritude. The Ink of the Scholars (2016) collects reflections on philosophy in Africa, including the scholarly tradition of Timbuktu. In De langue à langue (2022) he presented translation – with a phrase of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o – as “the language of languages”, a practice of hospitality between languages that builds a “lateral universal”, in Merleau-Ponty’s term, instead of an imposed one. His account of the debates on “Africanity” is drawn on in the SEP entry on contemporary Africana philosophy.

Life & context

Souleymane Bachir Diagne was born on 1 November 1955 in Saint-Louis in Senegal. After school in Dakar he went to the Lycée Louis-le-Grand in Paris and in 1977 entered the École normale supérieure, where Louis Althusser and Jacques Derrida were among his teachers; he passed the agrégation in philosophy in 1978 and took his doctorate with work on the algebraic logic of George Boole. He taught for about twenty years at the Université Cheikh Anta Diop in Dakar and from 1993 to 1999 advised President Abdou Diouf on education and culture. He then taught at Northwestern University (2002–08) and from 2008 at Columbia University in New York, as professor of French and of philosophy, where he has also directed the Institute of African Studies.

Further main works

• Boole, l’oiseau de nuit en plein jour (1989)
• Islam et société ouverte. La fidélité et le mouvement dans la pensée de Muhammad Iqbal (2001; English 2010)
• Léopold Sédar Senghor : l’art africain comme philosophie (2007; English 2011)
• Comment philosopher en islam ? (2008; English Open to Reason, 2018)
• Bergson postcolonial. L’élan vital dans la pensée de Senghor et de Mohamed Iqbal (2011)
• The Ink of the Scholars: Reflections on Philosophy in Africa (2016)
• De langue à langue. L’hospitalité de la traduction (2022)