Kwasi Wiredu

Dzieła

• 1980Philosophy and an African Culture (Filozofia a kultura afrykańska)

  Tradycję trzeba krytycznie badać – w Afryce tak samo jak na Zachodzie.

Stanowisko

Wiredu rejected the idea of a static, collective “African philosophy” and argued that traditions must be examined critically, in Africa as in the West. His program of “conceptual decolonization” asks African philosophers to test inherited Western concepts such as truth, mind or reality against their own languages. If a problem cannot even be formulated in Akan, it may rest on a quirk of English rather than on reality. Politically he proposed a “consensual democracy” modelled on Akan councils, which seek agreement instead of majority rule. Wiredu became one of the founders of modern academic philosophy in Africa.

Życie i kontekst

Wiredu was born in Kumasi in the Gold Coast in 1931 and studied philosophy at the University of Ghana and then at Oxford, where Gilbert Ryle was among his teachers. For more than two decades he taught at the University of Ghana. From the late 1980s he worked at the University of South Florida in the United States. He died in January 2022.

Dalsze główne dzieła

• Cultural Universals and Particulars (1996)
• A Companion to African Philosophy (2004)

Pojawia się w

• Debata „Dekolonizacja myśli”