This book investigates how knowledge is conceived and explored within the African context. Epistemology, or the theory of knowledge, has historically been dominated by the Western approach to the discourse of knowledge. This book however shines a much-needed spotlight on knowledge systems originating within the African continent.
Bringing together key voices from across the field of African philosophy, this book explores the nature of knowledge across the continent and how they are rooted in Africans’ ontological sense of being and self. At a time when moves to decolonize curricula are gaining momentum, this book shows how understanding the specific ways of knowing that form part of the every day life of the African, will play an important part in rebalancing studies of philosophy globally. Employing critical, conceptual and rigorous analyses of the nature and essence of knowledge as understood by indigenous African societies, the book ultimately asks what could pass as an African theory of knowledge.
This important guide to the connections between knowledge and being, in African philosophical thought, will be an important resource for researchers and students of philosophy and African studies.
Part One: Knowledge and Knowing in African Epistemology 1. African Epistemology – Knowledge Ontologised 2. Knowledge and Truth as Interaction between the Knower and Being: Knowing in African Epistemology 3. Exploring the Theory of Communo-Cognition Part Two: On the Object of Knowledge in African Epistemology 4. Understanding a Thing’s Nature: Comparing Afro-Relational and Western-Individualist Ontologies 5. Being as the Object of Knowledge in African Spaces 6. The Ontological Foundation of African Knowledge: A Critical Discourse in African Communitarian Ontology Part Three: Context-discourse of African Epistemology 7. Truth in African (Esan) Philosophy 8. From Ontology to Knowledge Acquisition in Africa and the Caribbean: What can be known for Certain? 9. EòleòìeòÌriì as OmoòluìaÌbiì: The Interface of Epistemic Justification and Virtue Ethics in an African Culture Part Four: African Epistemology in Applied Context 10. Onto-normative Monism in the ሐተታ (hòāteta) of Zera Yaqob: Insights into Ethiopian Epistemology and Lessons for the Problem of Superiorism 11. Personalism and an African Epistemology of Personhood 12. Knowledge, Being, and the Case for an African Epistemology
Peter Aloysius Ikhane is Lecturer in the Department of Philosophy, University of Ibadan, Nigeria. Isaac E. Ukpokolo is Professor in the Department of Philosophy, University of Ibadan, Nigeria
