Abstract
I begin with a defence of both Gyekye’s universalist and African metaphilosophies. In light of these metaphilosophies, I discuss the contemporary Western hegemony of materialist philosophy of mind and its origins in Gilbert Ryle’s The Concept of Mind (1949), showing that the existence and nature of the traditional Akan philosophy, as elaborated by Gyekye, casts serious doubt on some influential founding motivations for materialism. I then argue that traditional Akan philosophy is best aligned with contemporary idealism. Gyekye’s endorsement of dualism is shown to have not been intended as ontologically fundamental, while panpsychism is rejected on the basis of the resistance it offers to the Akan commitment to transcendence. Contemporary idealism, however, is able to accommodate all the main components of traditional Akan philosophy, making both experiential primacy and transcendence central to a metaphysical understanding of reality. Sunsum (spirit) and ōkra (soul) are understood in terms of the distinction between the phenomenal and horizonal conceptions of experience, with consciousness always requiring a distinction between the phenomenal world within an experiential horizon, and the independent being that transcends the horizon.
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Notes
- 1.
Gyekye uses the term ‘preliterate’ throughout the book; initially, in the preface, to make the point that although traditional Akan philosophy was not written down, it was still, in his view, the product of the individual intellects of individual philosophers, and hence should not be characterised as an ‘ethnophilosophy’ (ibid.: xix).
- 2.
This point is emphasised in Julia Tanney’s introduction to the new edition I cite from, as well as in her online Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article on Ryle.
- 3.
Ernest Gellner, in his 1959 attack on linguistic philosophy, Words and Things (the word ‘attack’ is in the subtitle), observed that, ‘Evasiveness is implicit in the ideas and in the practice of Linguistic Philosophy’ (Gellner, 1959: 50). Ryle, as editor of the journal Mind, refused to allow Gellner’s book to be reviewed on the grounds that it was malicious; as indeed it was (Czeglédy, 2003: 13).
- 4.
Ryle was not the first to think this way; Rorty’s historical deconstruction was mainly influenced by Dewey (1930).
- 5.
These kinds of position originate with Parfit (1984) and are often aligned with Buddhist views; Parfit himself made this connection.
- 6.
Ada Agada also points out that Gyekye’s dualism should not be considered an ‘ontological distinction’ (Agada, 2017: 31).
- 7.
Gyekye also seems to be equating materialism with eliminative materialism in this passage; but not elsewhere in the book.
- 8.
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Tartaglia, J. (2023). Gyekye and Contemporary Idealism. In: Attoe, A.D., Temitope, S.S., Nweke, V., Umezurike, J., Chimakonam, J.O. (eds) Conversations on African Philosophy of Mind, Consciousness and Artificial Intelligence. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-36163-0_2
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