Organiser: Research Cluster "Society and Culture in Motion" and DFG Priority Program 1448 "Adaptation and Creativity in Africa"
Venue: University of Halle
Abstract:
In order to decolonize the history of philosophy against the fabrication of translatio studiorum as the unilinear path connecting Greek thought and sciences to medieval European Christianity, we need to pluralize that history. And to manifest in our textbooks that translatio studiorum is not just Jerusalem-Athens-Rome-Paris or London or Heidelberg … but, as well: Athens-Nishapur-Bagdad-Cordoba-Fez-Timbuktu …. To decolonize the history of philosophy is also to take into account the plurality of languages, in order to consider the perspectives introduced by tongues other than European, and thus undo the “ontological nationalism” upon which rests the assumption that philosophical exercise is intrinsically tied to certain (European) languages.
Souleymane Bachir Diagne is currently Professor of Francophone Studies, and Chair of the Department of French and Romance Philology with a secondary appointment in the Department of Philosophy, at Columbia University in New York. His field of research and teaching interests includes the history of logic and mathematics, history of philosophy, Islamic philosophy and Sufism, African philosophy and literature.
