The arc of personhood: Menkiti and Kant on becoming and being a person

This article seeks to come to a better understanding of the account of normative personhood given by the Nigerian philosopher Ifeyani Menkiti by engaging it with that of Kant. The idea is not to adjudicate between the two accounts, but to explore the philosophical possibilities and constraints in both. I focus on the moral significance of the afterlife in each account. I engage Kant's doctrine of the postulates in support of Menkiti's defense of belief in this-worldly ancestral existence and evaluate Kant's moral commitment to belief in the immortality of the soul in the light of Menkiti's more social conception of the afterlife. I close with some comments on the general need for greater cross-cultural philosophical engagement

Professor Katrin Flikschuh awarded Leverhulme International Networks Grant

Professor Katrin Flikschuh has been awarded a Leverhulme Trust International Networks Grant to work with colleagues from African, European and American universities on a project entitled ‘Domesticating Global Justice: Global Normative Theorizing in African Political Contexts’. This is the first Leverhulme Trust grant of this type to have been awarded to the LSE

LSE conference seeks to bridge gap between Western and African normative theorists

LSE’s Dr Katrin Flikschuh says the global justice debate will no longer be sustainable if links are not formed with normative thinkers from Africa

Philosophical racism

Philosophical discussions frame the problem of race as either a social or an historical one; race is rarely diagnosed as a problem in philosophy. This article employs African philosophical writings to capture the distinctiveness of philosophical racism. I offer some remarks on the concept of race, distinguish between social and philosophical racism, and set out African diagnoses of Western philosophical racism before considering possible responses to these diagnoses. I reject a blanket anti-racist prescriptivism and instead urge individual adoption of a research maxim that is responsive to opportunities for philosophical race reform as they arise within any domain of philosophical inquiry

Can I choose to be who I am not? on (African) subjectivity

This article engages Abraham Olivier’s recent distinction between ‘being’ and ‘choosing to be’ within his phenomenological approach to subjectivity in general and to African, communal subjectivity in particular. I recapitulate and problematize aspects of Olivier’s reverse phenomenological analysis, briefly contrasting it with more orthodox African approaches to the ontology of the self. I then hone in on the distinction between being who I am and choosing to be who I am not. I argue that I can indeed choose to be who I am not, subject to the proviso that I cannot choose to be who I am. I close with some reflections on the moral significance of conscientiously choosing to be who I am not

‘Thinking Across Borders’ course fosters exchange between African and Western political thought

On 17 and 18 February 2016 the Department of Government hosted ‘Thinking Across Borders’, a mini-course on Modern African Political Theory led by Dr Martin Odei Ajei, from the University of Ghana. Katrin Flikschuh and Paula Romero tell us about the key themes and debates from two days of engaging discussion

Kant’s contextualism

This article builds on David Velleman’s recent work on moral relativism to argue that Kant’s account of moral judgement is best read in a contextualist manner. More specifically, I argue that while for Kant the form of moral judgement is invariant, substantive moral judgements are nonetheless context-dependent. The same form of moral willing can give rise to divergent substantive judgements. To some limited extent, Kantian contextualism is a development out of Rawlsian constructivism. Yet while for constructivists the primary concern is with the derivation of generally valid principles of morality, Velleman’s Kant-inspired form of moral relativism demonstrates the indispensability to a Kantian approach of indexical reasons for action. I argue in turn that Velleman’s focus on the indexical nature of reasons for action must be supplemented by an account of account of agential reflexivity. The latter divides Kantian contextualism from Kantian relativism

Should African thinkers engage in the global justice debate?

This article asks under what conditions and on what terms current African thinkers can and should engage in the global justice debate. Following summary overviews of the Western-led global justice debate and post-independence African philosophy as two essentially separate, non-intersecting philosophical discourses, I go on to argue that the current generation of African thinkers can fruitfully intervene in the global justice debate if it succeeds in building on philosophical insights of the first-generation of African thinkers. In particular, current African thinkers might fruitfully engage the notion of ‘false universals’ developed by first generation African thinkers to challenge Western philosophical conceptions in general in order to re-invigorate recently neglected critical inquiry into the status of many of this more particular debate’s unreflective universality claims. Re-invigorating these more distinctively philosophical aspects of the global justice debate is particularly important, albeit also challenging, against the background of an international research climate that increasingly favours ‘impact-oriented’ approaches to philosophy and to the humanities more generally

Kant’s nomads: encountering strangers

There is a tendency within the literature to decry Kant as either a proto-imperialist or as a proto-democrat in relation to his views on distant strangers. I here take an alternative view, arguing that Kant’s cosmopolitan morality is considerably more context-sensitive than is often assumed. More specifically, I argue that Kant’s encounter with American nomads on the final pages of his Doctrine of Right reflects a nuanced reading of European settlers’ requisite comportment towards them: Kant neither endorses a universal duty of state entrance nor does he place nomads beyond all possible moral engagement with European settlers