This book offers a philosophical interpretation and critical analysis of the African cultural experience in modern times. In their attempt to evolve ways of life appropriate to our modern world culture, says Kwame Gyekye, African people face a number of unique societal challenges, some stemming from the values and practices of their traditional cultures, others representing the legacy of European colonialism. Defending the cross-cultural applicability of philosophical concepts developed in Western culture, Gyekye attempts to show the usefulness of such concepts in addressing a wide range of...

In this important and pioneering book, Kwame Gyekye examines postcolonial African experience from a viewpoint receptive to aspects of both traditional African cultures and Western political and moral theory. African people, in their attempt to evolve ways of life compatible with an increasingly globalized world cultural, intellectual, and political scene, face a number of unique societal challenges, some stemming, Gyekye argues, from traditional African values and practices, others representing the legacy of European colonialism. Enlisting Western political and philosophic concepts to clear,...

Defining the main principles of a distinct African philosophy, this work rejects the idea that an African philosophy consists simply of the work of Africans writing on philosophy. It argues that critical analyses of specific traditional African modes of thought are necessary to develop a distinctively African philosophy.

Believing that the intellectual enterprise called philosophy is essentially a part of the cultural as well as historical experience of a people, that the concepts and problems that occupy the attention of philosophers placed in different cultural spaces or historical times generally derive directly from those spaces and times, and that philosophy, in turn, has been most relevant to the development of human cultures, the Ghanaian philosopher Kwame Gyekye gives reflective attention in this book to some of the concepts and problems that in his view feature most prominently in the contemporary...

Kwame Nkrumah is globally recognized as a foremost pan-Africanist strategist and statesman. He is less widely acknowledged as a philosopher, in spite of his considerable philosophical training, seminal contribution to African political theory, and incisive critique of the ethics of international relations. Consciencism has the distinctive status of being the only published book that Nkrumah consciously meant to be a work of his philosophy, yet it has failed to attract the focused attention of philosophers. The chapters in Disentangling Consciencism: Essays on Kwame Nkrumah's Philosophy...