The Hermeneutics Of African Philosophy

Hermeneutics is a crucial but neglected perspective in African philosophy. Here, Tsenay Serequeberhan engages post-colonial African literature and the ideas of the African liberation struggle with critically-used insights from the European philosophical tradition. Continuing the work of Theophilus Okere and Okonda Okolo, this book attempts to overcome the debate between ethnophilosophy and professional philosophy, demonstrating that the promise of African philosophy lies with the critical development of the African hermeneutical perspective.

The Series: Studies in African Philosophy is a forum for the publication and wider dissemination of researches and reflections of value on all aspects of African philosophy. While recognising the special advantage of interdisciplinary approach in modern scholarship, it retains a special predilection for works that have special African philosophic import. Although Theophilus Okere's book African Philosophy has made remarkable impact on African philosophical scholarship, many may not be aware of the way he tried to apply his preferred method to other areas of the philosophical investigation in Africa and to overcome the risk of relativism through the promotion of intercultural dialogue in philosophy. The essays published in this volume bear testimony to the multivalent character of Okere's contribution to African philosophy. Most of the essays are about Okere's hermeneutics of culture. Some of the authors examine the method in itself, while others focus attention on its application to specific philosophical themes. Book jacket.

Explores overlapping concerns and themes in African(a) and continental philosophy. In Existence and Heritage, Tsenay Serequeberhan examines what the European philosophical tradition has to offer when encountered from the outsider perspective of postcolonial African thought. He reads Kant in the context of contemporary international relations, finds in Gadamer’s work a way of conceiving relations among differing traditions, and explores Heidegger’s analysis of existence as it converges with Marx’s critique of alienation. In the confluence of these different assessments, Serequeberhan articulates both a need and example of responding to Fanon’s call for a new kind of thinking in philosophy. He demonstrates both how continental philosophy can be a useful resource for theorizing Africa’s postcolonial condition and how postcolonial thought and African philosophy can provide a new way of approaching and understanding the Western tradition.

This book is a clarion call for African renaissance informed by African spirituality. It develops the vision that Africans can be the same in the process of change. Africans have to coincide with their ways of perceiving values, and to retrieve their identity wiped out by regrettable historical events. Even in this involvement of revalorisation of their stifled ways, Africans have to be aware of the fact that history has evolved and new human environments are taking place. Any attempt to recover African personality involves a triple necessity. First, to remember the past, second, to analyse critically what Africans have inherited from their past, and lastly, to project new ways and means for a genuine renaissance, free from alienation and exploitation. Bin-Kapela sees in Cultural hermeneutics an appropriate philosophical method to achieve this end of recognising and projecting African spirituality as a universal value.

This book is divided into three parts: Part one deals with introduction to Philosophy, covering primarily ancient historical period which deals with Cosmological questions leading to the birth of Metaphysics as a branch of Philosophy. Part two deals with African philosophy taking into consideration its subject matter from Anthropological and Theological literature. Part three delves into Religious discussion on Sacred Scripture as the main subject matter, covering such thematic issues as; Revelation, Inspiration, Hermeneutics, Sources and Canonicity.

With language at the center of interpretation and understanding, Hans-Georg Gadamer's hermeneutics claims to provide a solution of the intercultural problem of language and hermeneutics. He moves us to a higher universality, especially with regard to literature or texts and inner meaning. If this is the case, his approach would be relevant to the problems present in Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart. Hence the goal of this book is to apply this claim to universality to a hermeneutic or narrative text like Achebe's. Achebe's narrative text, like the Greek texts, is an excellent work for the application of universal hermeneutics. I am not questioning the validity of the universality of hermeneutics, but rather expressing how significant Gadamer's approach is to understanding other people, cultural texts and worldviews if hermeneutics is universal. Gadamer provides the philosophical optimism and platform that most African scholars' need in the interpretation and understanding of their own cultural texts andbeing understood by other non-African and European cultures and philosophical persuasions. Hermeneutics considers every text or people's worldviews as interpretive or capable of communicating meaning despite being different, foreign or strange to us. The universality of hermeneutics at its best leads to a dialogic hermeneutics in a world of global understanding/peaceful co-existence.