Aribiah David Attoe: Groundwork for a new kind of African metaphysics. The idea of predeterministic historicity

HUMA African Epistemologies Advanced Seminar Series

Speaker: Aribiah David Attoe (University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa)

Introduction: African ideas about the nature of being, God, causality, death, etc., have largely remained the same and unchallenged, mainly due to the hesitancy of some African scholars to question these suppositions or build beyond them. The need to project mostly pre-colonial traditional African views without a sustained critique or revamp (especially in African ethnophilosophical circles) encourages the unwillingness to move beyond traditional views and explore new/alternative metaphysical paradigms. 

The unwillingness by some to deconstruct traditional metaphysical thought, reconstruct newer and more contemporary metaphysical systems on the foundation of the more traditional ideas, and the need to explore other ontological perspectives, has necessitated this book [Aribiah D. Attoe: Groundwork for a New Kind of African Metaphysics].

This presentation discusses the groundwork for an alternative African metaphysics that first interrogates some of the important notions held by some traditional African thinkers and then builds on some plausible core ideas of anonymous traditional African philosophers to propose a largely materialistic account of reality from the African place. In this talk, I provide an overview of some of the core ideas about God, being, causality determinism and death.

About the speaker: Dr Aribiah David Attoe is a Lecturer at the University of Witwatersrand and is currently a co-recipient of the Global Philosophy of Religion Project grant from the John Templeton Foundation, in collaboration with the University of Birmingham, and hosted by the Centre for Leadership Ethics in Africa (CLEA), University of Fort Hare, South Africa. He was formerly a postdoc at the CLEA earned his PhD in African Philosophy at the University of Johannesburg, South Africa. He has (co)authored several articles and books, some of which include Groundwork for a New Kind of African Metaphysics: The Idea of Predeterministic Historicity (Palgrave, 2022). He also guest-edited the first ever book-length literature/special issue on “African Conceptions of the Meaning of Life”, published by the South African Journal of Philosophy. His research areas span African metaphysics, ethics and conceptions of meaning. He is a member of the prestigious Conversational School of Philosophy and has given various talks on areas related to his research areas at different international forums and conferences.