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The Camden Philosophical Society will explore a new theme at its next regularly scheduled meeting on Tuesday, July 15: Philosophy from outside the Western tradition. The material for discussion includes a podcast discussion of the general topic and a portion of the book The Ink of the Scholars: Reflections on Philosophy in Africa by Souleymane Bachir Diagne.
We begin this month’s Camden Philosophical Society discussion by considering a video from Sean Carroll’s Mindscape podcast: Episode 319, Bryan van Norden on Philosophy from the Rest of the World, found here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mKTm4FHVByE&list=PLrxfgDEc2NxY_fRExpDXr87tzRbPCaA5x
The July 15 session will, as usual, be a hybrid gathering from 3:30-5:30 pm EDT on the third Tuesday of the month. All are welcome to participate, in-person at the Picker Room of the Camden Public Library or by Zoom. That goes for visitors, as well as year-rounders in Maine, and friends of the society wherever you may be.
If you wish to participate via Zoom, please email sarahmiller@usa.net. You will receive a Zoom invitation on the morning of the meeting. Click on the “Join Zoom Meeting” link in that invitation at the time of the event.
As part of an effort to expand our own attention to philosophy from the rest of the world, we turn to Souleymane Diagne’s The Ink of the Scholars. Diagne is a Senegalese philosopher who teaches at Columbia University and works in Islamic and African philosophy, logic, epistemology.
The Ink of the Scholars asks how someone ‘other’ should speak of philosophy when philosophers of the West have been tasked “’with guarding the great divisions (between true and false, being and nothingness, just and unjust, same and other)’ and in so doing establishing the “great ‘division between “the self ” and “the rest,”’ between a humanity of the logos and the barbarians” (Professor Diagne quoting French philosopher Roger-Pol Droit).
Diagne considers a common challenge offered by the West to considering African thought as philosophy: “A philosophy to which one adheres, literally, without the possibility of questioning it – since there is no outside from which one could do this – is no longer a philosophy.” This has been offered as an explanation for why Bantu (Diagne’s term) understandings of a world animated by a living force would not count as a philosophical ontology.
What of our own built-in assumptions? What are the philosophies with which we live without the possibility of questioning “since there is no outside from which one could do this?” The dynamic Bantu ontology of a living force is typically opposed to the supposedly static Aristotelian ontology of positing an individual substance and then attributing different predicates to it.
And why, Diagne asks, “should the philosophers of exclusion whom Roger-Pol Droit evokes be granted the privilege of defining the ‘field of application’ of the word philosophy?”
Is African philosophy, “not like ours,” the way some think African languages lack the natural European capacity to abstract such that words are not well suited to conceptual thought. Heidegger, as Diagne points out, fancied that philosophy had only one language – formerly Greek, now German. Or is African philosophy like African art, of which Diagne quotes Picasso saying “African art? Never heard of it!”
We will take up the first 34 pages of Diagne’s book, including the “Introduction,” and chapter 1, “The Force of Living.” A PDF of the full book can be found here: https://publication.codesria.org/index.php/pub/catalog/view/40/164/4959