African (Bantu) philosophy conceptualizes morality through ubuntu, which emphasizes the role of community in producing moral agents. This community is characterized by practices that respond to and value interdependence, such as care, cooperation, and respect for elders and ancestral knowledge. While there have been attributions of morality to nonhuman animals in the interdisciplinary animal morality debate, this debate has focused on Western concepts. We argue that the ubuntu conception of morality as a communal practice applies to some nonhuman animals. African elephant communities are highly cooperative and structured around elders; they alloparent, protect their communities, mourn their dead, and pass on cultural knowledge between generations. Identifying these as important moral practices, ubuntu provides a theoretical framework to expand our ethical concern for elephants to their communities. In practice, this will deepen our understanding of the wrongness of atrocities like culling for population management or trophy hunting.

I aim to more fully develop a theory of meaning in life based on the concept of life force that is important to a substantial number of Africans in the sub-Sahara region. While life force implies a large invisible ontology, Thaddeus Metz has recently developed an entirely naturalistic version of it known as liveliness. However, he also offers two objections that hinge on the idea that life force cannot accommodate intuitions that certain types of knowledge and progress are valuable for their own sakes. I respond by noting that elsewhere Metz has developed a defense of the intrinsic value of knowledge by appealing to the idea that meeting a person's existential needs can be important for self-realization and hence for their meaning. If this is right, then the community ought to support such a person in their pursuit of knowledge even if doing so leads to no useful outcomes.

In a recent article in Religious Studies, Ada Agada argues that the problem of evil is relevant not only to those who consider God to hold the Omni-properties but also to those who understand God as a limited deity. He rightly points out that the limited-God literature in the African philosophy of religion has neglected to address the problem of evil by too quickly dismissing it. Agada then argues that the reason why the problem of evil is philosophically relevant for the limited-God view is that He, as the creator, has sufficient powers to address evil and, thereby, moral responsibility regarding the evil in the world. In this reply, I uphold that although Agada is correct to affirm that the problem of evil is relevant for the limited-God view, he is mistaken to contend that the reason is that God is the creator. I contest this view and argue that Agada has not given enough reasons to believe that God has moral responsibility over evil in the world. However, I illuminate how Agada can develop this argument in the future.

In this article, I show that: (1) There is a transcendence strain in African Traditional Religion (ATR) and traditional African thought that agrees perfectly with traditional monotheism and legitimizes the question of the relation of God with evil in the world. (2) There is incontrovertible evidence of the conception of God as a limited deity that subverts the categories of omnipotence and omniscience. (3) African philosophers of religion must show how a transcendent or, conversely, a limited God is related to the evil that exists in the world, since the overwhelming stance of ATR is that God is the creator of the world and wields effective power. I substitute the categories of omnipotence and omniscience with the novel categories of power and glory and argue that while a powerful and glorious God is not the author of evil and cannot eliminate evil in the world, such a God can be conceived as working to reduce the evil in the world through the instrumentality of human moral agency.

African perspectives on personhood and personal identity and their relation to those of the West have become far more central in mainstream Western discussion than they once were. Not only are African traditional views with their emphasis on the importance of community and social relations more widely discussed, but that emphasis has also received much wider acceptance and gained more influence among Western philosophers. Despite this convergence, there is at least one striking way in which the discussions remain apart and that is on a point of method. The Western discussion makes widespread use of thought experiments. In the African discussion, they are almost entirely absent. In this article, we put forward a possible explanation for the method of thought experiment being avoided that is based on considerations stemming from John Mbiti's account of the traditional African view of time. These considerations find an echo in criticism offered of the method in the Western debate. We consider whether a response to both trains of thought can be found that can further bring the Western and African philosophical traditions into fruitful dialogue.

This article provides an overview of the contributions to philosophy of Nigerian philosopher Sophie Bọ´sẹ`dé Olúwọlé (1935–2018). The first woman to earn a philosophy PhD in Nigeria, Olúwọlé headed the Department of Philosophy at the University of Lagos before retiring to found and run the Centre for African Culture and Development. She devoted her career to studying Yoruba philosophy, translating the ancient Yoruba Ifá canon, which embodies the teachings of Orunmila, a philosopher revered as an Óríṣá in the Ifá pantheon. Seeing his works as examples of secular reasoning and argument, she compared Orunmila's and Socrates' philosophies and methods and explored similarities and differences between African and European philosophies. A champion of African oral traditions, Olúwọlé argued that songs, proverbs, liturgies, and stories are important sources of African responses to perennial philosophical questions as well as to contemporary issues, including feminism. She argued that the complementarity that ran throughout Yoruba philosophy guaranteed women's rights and status, and preserved an important role for women, youths, and foreigners in politics.

We argue that philosophy education across the globe is still bedevilled with the ‘politics’ of marginalization of less favoured traditions like African philosophy. Extant works show that the conventional curriculum of philosophy used in educational institutions across the globe is predominantly Western and, as such, very much colonial. We contend that this amounts to a sort of ‘epistemic injustice’ that is detrimental to knowledge production. We argue specifically that this ‘politics’ should be discontinued. We propose the conversational tradition, out of which a philosophy curriculum that is comprehensive and antithetical to the politics of exclusion may be developed.

The central argument of this article is that within the discourse around the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), many scholars have insufficiently applied the concept of an indigenous African worldview in their analysis of the TRC’s work, leading them at times to describe the process as coerced, contradictory, and politically manipulated. Using the different stages of my research as well as the different texts that “lit up” every phase, I argue that through a focus on language and translation, the pervasiveness of a particular worldview of interconnectedness can be traced that enabled the commission to execute its mandate creatively and without incidences of revenge. The acknowledgement of an indigenous interconnectedness has wide implications for the concept of transitional justice as it rejuvenates the main concepts of healing, amnesty, and reconciliation. As a journalist who reported on the daily activities of the commission, I move in this piece between the different epistemic communities of journalism, writing, and academia in order to understand the way in which language and its underlying epistemology provides an important access route to understanding the workings of the TRC and the testimonies provided by witnesses.