Philosophizing in African Languages

Theme of the Lecture Series

The mutual influence of language and philosophizing has been a topic of debate for centuries. Do languages determine how we think? Do certain languages suggest certain thought constellations? Is translation a universal language?

To this theoretical debate, we want to respond with concrete examples of philosophizing in African languages. The African continent is home to more than 3.000 languages. With European colonization, most of these languages have been marginalized in academic discourses at the expense of English, French, and Portuguese.

Nevertheless, philosophy exists and has been existing for several thousand years in Indigenous African languages and deserves our attention. Taking polylogue as a point of departure as a philosophical method, we invite philosophers from around the world to introduce us to specific forms of philosophizing in Africa. These include ancient traditions of philosophizing as recorded in Egyptian hieroglyphs or Ethiopian manuscripts written in Ge’ez, as well as contemporary practices of philosophizing in Sesotho, Kinyarwanda, or Yorùbá.