HUMA Postdoctoral Seminar Series

Speaker: Dr Aribiah David Attoe (University of the Witwatersrand) 

Bio: Dr Aribiah David Attoe is a Lecturer at the University of the Witwatersrand and was 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. He has (co)authored and edited several books, some of which include; The Question of Life's Meaning: An African Perspective (Palgrave, 2023, forthcoming), Conversations on African Philosophy of Mind, Consciousness and Artificial Intelligence (Springer, 2023), Groundwork for a New Kind of African Metaphysics: The Idea of Predeterministic Historicity (Palgrave, 2022). New Conversations on the Problems of Identity, Consciousness and Mind (Springer, 2019). He is also a member of the prestigious Conversational School of Philosophy. His major research areas of interest span across: African metaphysics, African philosophy of religion, ethics and African Conceptions of Meaning, and he has given various talks on areas related to his research areas at different international forums and conferences.

Topic:  The question of life’s meaning seems at once a trivial question and, at the same time, the most important question for any human being in the world. While some might consider it a nonsensical question, others may prefer to understand it as ánikúlápò – a question that carries in its pouch the very power of life and death. For in asking, whether one’s life has meaning, one is asking whether one ought to live or die. Indeed, why continue to live if the pointlessness of living is made manifest in clear convincing arguments? Or why try to die, when there is every good reason to be alive and pursue meaning?  In this discussion, which pre-empts the launch of the book The Question of Life's Meaning: An African Perspective, I talk about various accounts of meaning from the African Perspective, and show why they fail, as meaning prostrates before the inevitability of death and/or the tedium of immortality.