Monthly Archives: December 2018

Sophie Oluwole on Why Philosophers Can’t Read (Hint: They are Toothless)

ó d’ órí akáyín, àkàrà d’ eegun
(For the toothless, the cake becomes a bone)
— Sophie Oluwole

It is a striking dimension of North Atlantic philosophy that it has failed to find satisfaction in declaring unfamiliar or differing philosophical traditions “bad” or “poor” philosophy. Rather, it has desired a far more categorical victory in rendering these intellectual formations non-philosophical, anti-philosophical even. The Nigerian philosopher Sophie Oluwole, in the context of a brilliantly nuanced engagement with the Kenyan philosopher Odera Oruka’s Sage Philosophy Project, commented thus on this phenomenon:

Another important point which most of Oruka’s critics fail to recognize is the fact that an inadequate philosophy is philosophy still. This is why it is possible to access philosophical treatises in terms of degrees of success. A philosophy may be rationally inadequate for many reasons. It does not, by that token, become geography or mythology. Many analytic philosophers appear unable to distinguish between a work produced in a tradition different from their own and another produced completely out of philosophy. The tradition of analytic philosophers condemning continental philosophy as irrational and non-philosophical just because it does not fit within the analytic tradition can no more hold sway. Oruka’s Sage Philosophy Project was meant to demonstrate that such a move cannot be intellectually justified. Philosophers do not have to belong to the same methodological tradition even though they cannot opt out of reason.
— Sophie B. Oluwole, “Oruka’s Mission in African Philosophy”

Notes on Reading Philosophy

“The primary problem isn’t that North Atlantic philosophers don’t read Africana thinkers and theorists; the deeper problem is that they don’t know how to read them.”
— Omedi Ochieng

“An important fact which many philosophers often forget is that the level of success of a project in philosophy can only be adequately determined when a critic has a clear understanding of the primary challenge a colleague sets out to meet.”
— Sophie Oluwole,”Oruka’s Mission in African Philosophy”

“Paul Grice use to say that we “should treat great and dead philosophers as we treat great and living philosophers, as having something to say to us.” That is fine, so long as it is not assumed that what the dead have to say to us is much the same as what the living have to say to us. Unfortunately, this is probably what was being assumed by those who, in the heyday of confidence in what was being called the “analytic history of philosophy,” encouraged us to read something written by Plato “as though it had come out in Mind last month” – an idea which, if it means anything at all, means something that destroys the main philosophical point of reading Plato at all.”
— Bernard Williams, “Philosophy as a Humanistic Discipline”)

“Questions that, alas, I don’t see often enough from a certain kind of philosopher: How should I read this? What is the background against which this speech act is emergent? What is this utterance’s (asymptotic) horizon? Who is being addressed and why?”
–Omedi Ochieng