Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò: Rewriting the History of Modern Philosophy

ANTON WILHELM AMO LECTURE N°10: Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò: Rewriting the History of Modern Philosophy: On Philosophy of History, Political Philosophy and Liberal Education in 19th Century West Africa
amo-lectures.u...
In recent work, I have been concerned to reinscribe into the history of modern philosophy the contributions of those I have styled “excluded moderns” from the African corner of the intellectual globe. This lecture, contrary to the bastard periodization that dominates the historiography of African ideas, presents evidence of philosophy of a standardly modern variety being done in West Africa in the 19th century that could not answer to the problematic categories of “traditional” or “precolonial” African philosophy. I introduce three thinkers who lived and worked in West Africa during the period whose ideas belong in the annals of modern philosophy. I look at the works of James Africanus Beale Horton, Alexander Crummell, and Edward Wilmot Blyden focusing specifically on their philosophy of history, political philosophy, and philosophy of education. It is time the narratives of the history of modern philosophy took seriously the essential hybridity that defines it. The continuing failure to do so makes it impossible for honest teachers of philosophy to deliver its history and register truthfully the biographies of its contributors located in a particular neck of the global woods-West Africa.