History of Philosophy: India, Africana, China

HAP 21 - The Doctor Will See You Now - Divination, Witchcraft, and Knowledge

Special forms of knowledge and the explanation of misfortunes in African tradition.

HAP 20 - I Am Because We Are - Communalism in African Ethics and Politics

Emphasis on the value of community as a major theme in African philosophy.

HAP 19 - Behind the Mask - African Philosophy of the Person

Traditional African ideas about personhood, which challenge assumptions about the relation between mind and body, self and other.

HAP 18 - One to Rule Them All - God in African Philosophy

Is traditional African religion in some sense monotheist, despite the worship of many divinities?

HAP 17 - Event Horizon - African Philosophy of Time

John Mbiti’s influential and controversial claim that traditional Africans experience time as having “a long past, a present, and virtually no future.”

HAP 16 - Samuel Imbo on Okot p'Bitek and Oral Traditions

A conversation with Sam Imbo on approaching oral traditions as philosophy and the Ugandan thinker and poet Okot p'Bitek.

HAP 15 - Heard it Through the Grapevine - Oral Philosophy in Africa

An introduction to the “ethnophilosophy” approach inaugurated by Placide Tempels, its promises and potential pitfalls.

HAP 14 - Souleymane Bachir Diagne on Islam in Africa

Peter speaks to Souleymane Bachir Diagne about Islamic scholars in West Africa.

HAP 13 - Renewing the Faith - the Sokoto Caliphate

Uthman Dan Fodio and his family were scholars, poets, and warriors whose jihad in 19th century Nigeria created the Sokoto Caliphate.

HAP 12 - From Here to Timbuktu - Subsaharan Islamic Philosophy

The spread of Islamic scholarship in subsaharan Africa, focusing on intellectuals of the Songhay empire around the Niger River in the 15th-17th centuries.