Dr. Richmond Kwesi
Short-Term Fellow
June 2025
Bio
Richmond Kwesi is a Senior Lecturer and the current Head of the Department of Philosophy and Classics in the School of Arts at the University of Ghana. He is also an Associate of Clare Hall, University of Cambridge. He obtained his PhD in 2017 from the University of Cape Town, South Africa.
His teaching and research stems from a passion to engage in practically-oriented philosophical inquiry into human thought and practices and the ways in which they can promote human well-being and development. With training and expertise in analytic philosophy, he engages in two main strands of research: one, Philosophy of Language and Epistemology, and two, African Philosophical Thought and Practices. His research in philosophy of language is on metaphor, truth and assertion, where he has published papers to show how metaphors can be truth-evaluable within an inferentialist theory. On African philosophical thought, he researches on African consensual democracy, Kwasi Wiredu’s Empiricalism and Kwame Nkrumah’s Consciencism.
He is co-editing a volume on Kwame Gyekye’s philosophy and doing a critical commentary on J. B. Danquah’s 1927 PhD thesis in philosophy. His focus on the works of these Ghanaian philosophers (Kwame Nkrumah, J. B. Danquah, Kwasi Wiredu, Kwame Gyekye, William Abraham) are both to provide critical reflections on their ideas and to bring to light their enduring significance on contemporary issues. He is also working on a monograph on consensual democracy for Cambridge Elements to be published by Cambridge University Press.
Kwesi was the recipient of the 2017 COH Provost’s Publication Awards (Early Career), and the Winner of the Kwasi Wiredu Essay Prize on African Epistemology and Metaphysics funded by the Carnegie Corporation at the University of Dar es Salaam in 2019. For his research on consensual democracy, he was awarded a 2-year Andrew Mellon Foundation grant (2018-2020) through the College of Humanities’ REHURE project. He held a Bechs-Africa Post-doctoral Fellowship at the American University in Cairo in 2020. He has participated in the Erasmus+ Staff Mobility programs at Utrecht University (2023) and the University of Valladolid (2024). He recently edited a Special Issue on African consensual democracy for the journal, The Philosophical Forum, published by Wiley-Blackwell. His paper in this Special Issue, The Will to Consensus, won the 2024 COH Provost’s Publication Award (Mid-Career). Kwesi has recently been awarded the Global Minds Research Scholarship for a research stay at the University of Antwerp in 2025.
Research
Philosophy of Language, Analytic Philosophy, African Philosophy, Political Philosophy
Regions
Ghana, West Africa
Languages
Akan, English
Articles
“The Will to Consensus,” Philosophical Forum, 55/2 (2024), pp. 173-188.
“People and Power in an African Consensual Democracy,” South African Journal of Philosophy, 40/4 (2021), pp. 362-383.
“Theoretical Underpinnings of Wiredu’s Empiricalism,” UTAFITI: Journal of African Perspectives 15 (2020), pp. 333-347.
“Semantic Meaning and Content: The Intractability of Metaphor,” Studia Semiotyczne, 33/1 (2019), pp. 105-134.
“Davidson’s Phenomenological Argument Against the Cognitive Claims of Metaphor,” Axiomathes 31 (2019), pp. 1-24.
“An Inferential Articulation of Metaphorical Assertions,” Italian Journal of Philosophy of Language – RIFL, 13/1 (2019), pp. 116-132.
“William Abraham: Mind of Africa,” Contemporary Journal of African Studies, 6/1 (2019), pp. 158-162.
“Metaphor, Truth, and Representation,” in: Piotr Stalmaszczyk (ed.), Objects of Inquiry in Philosophy of Language and Linguistics, Berlin: Peter Lang, 2018, pp. 117–146.
Kwesi, R. (2018). “Resemblance and Identity in Wallace Stevens’ Conception of Metaphor,” in: Kacper Bartczak and Jakub Macha (eds.), Wallace Stevens: Poetry, Philosophy, and Figurative Language, Berlin: Peter Lang, 2018, pp. 113-137.
Ajei, M., & Kwesi, R. (2018). “Consciencism, Ubuntu, and Justice,” (with Ajei, M.), Nigerian Journal of Philosophy 26 (2018), 61-90.
“The Logic of Consciencism,” in: Martin Ajei (ed.), Disentangling Consciencism: Essays on Kwame Nkrumah’s Philosophy, Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2017, pp. 185-198.
