Information sur l'intervenant

Pr Lewis Ricardo-Gordon

University of Connecticut

Storrs, USA

Lewis Ricardo-Gordon is Professor and Head of the Department of Philosophy at UCONN-Storrs; Honorary President of the Global Center for Advanced Studies; Visiting Professor at the University of Johannesburg, South Africa; and Distinguished Scholar at The Most Honourable PJ Patterson Centre for Africa-Caribbean Advocacy at The University of the West Indies, Mona. He co-edits the journal Philosophy and Global Affairs and is the author of many books, including, most recently, Freedom, Justice, and Decolonization (2021) and Fear of Black Consciousness (2022). He is this year’s recipient of the Eminent Scholar Award from the Global Development Studies division of the International Studies Association.

Titre de la communication

“African Philosophy and the Future of Humankind and Its Institutions”

Résumé de Communication

Abstract

It is no secret that recent African philosophy has a colonial problem. Debates about it have too often taken conservative forms: either to embrace a colonial logic that erases African agency or valorize the past in ways that, although bolstering the spirit, ignores the future or enchains it to conceptions of the self and nation that are more suited for the past. There are of course, non-conservative turns, wherein philosophers aim for a better future. That turn, often marked by a penchant for decolonization, has a negative commitment (exclusively elimination) and a positive one (creative transformation). The negative commitment at times ironically slides into the conservative project through a failure to examine conditions for a viable future. This trap, which the speaker at times describes as “disciplinarily decadent,” demands building a philosophy for the future that involves, ironically and paradoxically, its practitioners’ willingness of going beyond philosophy. For African philosophy beyond philosophy, which is ironically philosophical, this requires rethinking power, decoupling the nation-state dyad, reimagining building public institutions, and addressing global citizenship with an understanding of values in which becoming ancestors only makes sense when and where there are descendants whose lives are, proverbially, worth living in terms meaningful for them and theirs to come.