Philosopher
Kwasi Wiredu
1931–2022
Ghanaian philosopher whose programme of "conceptual decolonisation" helped establish modern African philosophy as a discipline, critical of both colonial habits of thought and unexamined tradition.
Kwasi Wiredu was born in Ghana in 1931 and first read philosophy at school in Kumasi; a collection of Plato’s dialogues on the last days of Socrates, which he found in 1950, later shaped the dialogue that closes his first book. At the University of Ghana he was taught almost entirely Western philosophy, and came to African thought through his own reading. Trained in the British analytic tradition, he worked for decades in logic and epistemology as well as African philosophy, and moved to the United States in 1985, where he was increasingly asked to teach African philosophy.
His Philosophy and an African Culture (1980), with its critique of Marxism and its studies of truth, ideology and language, and his later essays on conceptual decolonisation made him one of the founders of contemporary African philosophy. Critics have wished he had engaged more with postcolonial theory and African feminisms, but his contribution to establishing the discipline across Africa is widely acknowledged.
Key ideas
- Conceptual decolonisation
- African thought should be re-examined with two aims. One is to remove Western ideas that African philosophers took on uncritically through colonial education; the other is to discard the outdated parts of traditional culture that weaken modern African thought.
- Test it in your own language
- An African philosopher should test philosophical formulations against intuitions in their own language. Ideas framed in a European language may rest on that language’s peculiarities, and seeing whether they survive translation separates what is universal from what is local.
- Tradition under critique
- Traditional thought and folk philosophy should be clarified and critically assessed, not simply celebrated. A practice such as polygamy made sense in a traditional setting but is inappropriate in a modern economy.
- Marx, great but mistaken
- Wiredu counted Marx among the great philosophers, yet had deep reservations about Marxism, and criticised it vigorously in his first book at a time when many African intellectuals treated it as their main ideological tool.
- Tradition
- African
- Region
- Ghana and the United States
- Period
- The Great Debate
- Themes
- Language and meaning
Influences
Where these links come from
- Kwasi Wiredu drew on Plato. Source: Sanya Osha, Kwasi Wiredu, Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
- Kwasi Wiredu argued against Karl Marx. Source: Sanya Osha, Kwasi Wiredu, Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Key works
- Philosophy and an African Culture, 1980
- Conceptual Decolonisation in African Philosophy, 1995
- Cultural Universals and Particulars
Sources
- Sanya Osha, Kwasi Wiredu, Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy