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It is not far-fetched to say that much of what is termed "African metaphysics" remains a traditional affair, without the sort of critical analysis that sheds away the burden of myths and ethnocentric rigidity. African ideas about the nature of being, God, causality, death, etc., have largely remained the same and unchallenged, mainly due to the hesitancy of some African scholars to question these suppositions or build beyond them. In this book, Aribiah David Attoe presents a unified African metaphysics that first interrogates important notions held by many traditional African thinkers, and then builds upon them to propose a largely materialistic account of African metaphysics. The book re-imagines and reconstructs the idea of God, being, causality and death in African metaphysics, tackling some of the problems associated with these concepts in African thought. It also opens up new vistas of thought, while engaging and encouraging African metaphysicians to explore a previously ignored perspective.
List of contents
Chapter one: Introduction.- Chapter Two: Existence and the Thing We Call God.- Chapter Three: Being, in Singular Complementarity.- Chapter Four: From Causality to Predeterministic Historicity (PDH).- Chapter Five: Determinism and the Death of Free Will.- Chapter Six: Death in our Predeterministic world.- Chapter Seven: Conclusion.
About the author
Aribiah David Attoe is currently a Lecturer at the University of Witwatersrand, South Africa; and a member of the Conversational Society of Philosophy, Calabar, Nigeria.
Report
"The book covers a remarkable amount of ground. ... Attoe's book is impressive in that it is system building in a way many philosophers shy away from these days. Instead of only criticizing views, he develops a full-scale metaphysical picture of the world. And it is fascinating that he thinks there are grounds in the African tradition for this novel theory." (Kirk Lougheed, International Journal for Philosophy of Religion, Vol. 96 (2), 2024)
"This brilliant book, Groundwork for a New Kind of African Metaphysics: The Idea of Predeterministic Historicity, is an impressive new addition to the literature on African metaphysics. It is a bold, original, and challenging book that invites the reader to soberly contemplate a cold, mechanical and, perhaps, ultimately meaningless universe in which even the concept of God does not serve any consolatory purpose." (Ada Agada, Phronimon, Vol. 23, 2022)
