Michael Omoge: Epistemic ignorance and the geography of philosophical traditions

HUMA African Epistemologies Advanced Seminar Series

Speaker: Michael Omoge (University of Alberta, Canada)

Introduction: Africans trained within the African continent in the analytic philosophical tradition often cut a controversial figure both within African and Western philosophical communities. In both communities, fellow philosophers often either wonder why analytic philosophy or applaud their philosophical dexterity. Though for different reasons, both scenarios are epistemically pernicious. In this talk, I codify this harm as geographically-based philosophical ignorance (or geo-philosophical ignorance, for short), show that variants of it are widespread, present the layered ways in which it is epistemically vicious, and demonstrate how analysing it contributes uniquely to social epistemology. 

About the speaker: Dr Michael Omoge is an Assistant Professor at the University of Alberta, Canada. Before then, he was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Toronto until June 2022 and an Andrew W. Mellon postdoctoral fellow at the University of the Western Cape, South Africa in 2021. He obtained his PhD from the University of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa in 2020. He works on a variety of topics in both analytic and African traditions of philosophy, including but not limited to perception, imagination, naturalised and social epistemology, philosophy of education, and philosophical method.