Dear SCOT-PG-PHIL Subscribers,
I hope the following will be of interest to
you:
On Reason
Rationality in a World of Cultural
Conflict and Racism
Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze
“Emmanuel
Chukwudi Eze has done significant work thinking critically about race,
politics, history, and the discipline of philosophy. In On Reason, he
makes evident the breadth and depth of African philosophy and its deep and
often problematic connections to the political. The political must, as it were,
be thought, and that is difficult, demanding, necessarily creative and
troubling work. It is work that Eze does not shirk from, especially as a
thinker deeply rooted in the cultural traditions and philosophies of Africa.”—Grant
Farred, author of What’s My Name? Black Vernacular Intellectuals
“Emmanuel
Chukwudi Eze takes on one of the most difficult challenges of the day: the
possibility that reason, and therefore philosophy, transcends culture and
history and does not simply reflect the hegemony of one culture. I like his
attempts to ‘ground’ reason in experience while still maintaining reason’s
authority. This is a difficult trick given our habits of thought, but he makes
a plausible and important case especially to be prized by cultural theorists
who want to think ‘diversity’ without having to fend off endless arguments
about ‘relativism.’”—William Rasch, author of Sovereignty and Its
Discontents: On the Primacy of Conflict and the Structure of the Political
Given that Enlightenment rationality developed in Europe as
European nations aggressively claimed other parts of the world for their own
enrichment, scholars have made rationality the subject of postcolonial
critique, questioning its universality and objectivity. In On Reason,
the late philosopher Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze demonstrates that rationality, and
by extension philosophy, need not be renounced as manifestations or tools of
Western imperialism. Examining reason in connection to the politics of
difference—the cluster of issues known variously as cultural diversity,
political correctness, the culture wars, and identity politics—Eze expounds a
rigorous argument that reason is produced through and because of difference. In
so doing, he preserves reason as a human property while at the same time
showing that it cannot be thought outside the realities of cultural diversity.
Advocating rationality in a multicultural world, he proposes new ways of
affirming both identity and difference.
Eze draws on an extraordinary command of Western philosophical thought and a
deep knowledge of African philosophy and cultural traditions. He explores
models of rationality in the thought of philosophers from Aristotle, René
Descartes, Francis Bacon, and Thomas Hobbes to Noam Chomsky, Richard Rorty,
Hilary Putnam, and Jacques Derrida, and he considers portrayals of reason in
the work of the African thinkers and novelists Chinua Achebe, Ngugi wa Thiong’o,
and Wole Soyinka. Eze reflects on contemporary thought about genetics, race,
and postcolonial historiography as well as on the interplay between reason and
unreason in the hearings of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
He contends that while rationality may have a foundational formality, any
understanding of its foundation and form is dynamic, always based in historical
and cultural circumstances.
Duke University Press
July 2008 400pp £17.99 PB
978-0-8223-4195-6
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