Lexington Books
Pages: 286
•
Trim: 6⅜ x 9½
978-1-4985-8365-7 • Hardback • July 2020 • $129.00 • (£99.00)
978-1-4985-8366-4 • eBook • July 2020 • $45.00 • (£35.00)
Edwin Etieyibo is professor of philosophy at the University of the Witwatersrand.
Polycarp Ikuenobe is professor of philosophy at Kent State University.
Preface
Introduction
Edwin Etieyibo and Polycarp Ikuenobe
Chapter 1: Caught Between Two Manifestos: Menkiti and an Attempt at a Mediation
Dismas A. Masolo
Chapter 2: Discussions of African Communitarianism with Specific Reference to Menkiti and Rawls
Barry Hallen
Chapter 3: Persons and Citizens
Katrin Flikschuh
Chapter 4: The Sociality of Persons
Edwin Etieyibo
Chapter 5: Personal Persistence and Narrative Unity: The Case of Ancestral Persons
Oritsegbubemi Anthony Oyowe
Chapter 6: Menkiti’s Account of the Social Ontology of African Community and Persons Polycarp Ikuenobe
Chapter 7: African Communitarianism and the Imperative for Moral Education
Michael Onyebuchi Eze
Chapter 8: Community, Individuality, and Reciprocity in Menkiti
Thaddeus Metz
Chapter 9: Elderhood and Ancestorhood: Exemplar of a Person in African Community
Polycarp Ikuenobe and Edwin Etieyibo
Chapter 10: An Outline of Menkiti’s Metaphysical Commitment
Bernard Matolino
Chapter 11: Personhood and State Building in Africa
Emmanuel Ifeanyi Ani
Chapter 12: I Can’t Unless You Can
Helen Lauer
Chapter 13: Before a Common Soil: Personhood, Community and the Duty to Bear Witness
Uchenna Okeja
Chapter 14: Who Gets a Place in Person-Space?
Simon Beck and Oritsegbubemi Anthony Oyowe
Chapter 15: Menkiti as a Man of Community
Edwin Etieyibo
Afterword
About the Contributors
"This collection of essays constitute testaments to the depth of a foremost contemporary African philosopher’s reflections on one of the most important issues which determine the direction/quality of human existence as a gregarious being. Are human beings atoms and individuals, with no connections or obligations to any other, but the self? Or, are human beings the products of families, communities, and societies and, therefore, beings that bear responsibility for the well-being of others as well as of self? As humanity navigates the 21st century, coming from the declining fortunes of destructively dominant Western traditions which privilege violence, inequality, and bigotry of all forms, centering African understanding of personhood as a social, community-based being—local and global—is a project which harkens back to the role Africa has placed in birthing human civilization and which has ensured the survival of post-apartheid South Africa grounded in Ubuntu philosophy. The essays in this volume will continue to serve as reference markers for scholarship and research into African/global humanity in the years and decades to come."
— John Ayotunde Isola Bewaji, University of the West Indies
The authors of this text must be appreciated for their analytical acumen in dissecting the concept of personhood. The dynamism of their thoughts and the dexterity of their espousals are second to none. This text will remain for a long time to come one of the profoundest, clearest, ambitious, critical and rigorous text on the concept of personhood.
— G. O. Ozumba, University of Calabar, Nigeria