Rhetoric, philosophy, and the praxis of knowledge articulation: Ontology, epistemology, and teleology at the intersection of African and Western philosophy

The debate in African philosophy has consisted of arguments about the existence, definition, and possibilities of African philosophy. The interlocutors to this debate have taken sharply divergent positions. The first school, widely known as "ethnophilosophers," hold that insofar as "African philosophy" exists, it is completely antithetical to European thought; whereas, they argue, European philosophy is distinguished by skeptical individual thinkers, African philosophy is characterized by communally-shared and unchanging beliefs. Their critics, who are mainly "professional philosophers" in universities in Africa, argue that "African philosophy" could not have existed in the absence of reading and writing and thus can only be said to have began in the wake of European colonialism. Another position has been advanced by the Kenyan philosopher Odera Oruka in what he described as the "sage philosophy project." Oruka identified "sages" in African communities---who he claimed could not read and write---and argues that their presence proves that "philosophy" exists in Africa.;This dissertation offers a critique of the rhetoric of African philosophy (its ontology, epistemology, and teleology) and outlines an alternative critical contextual rhetoric to it. I offer a critique of the ontology of knowledge of the interlocutors to the debate. This ontology structures their conceptualization of "philosophy" in essentialist, transcendental, and ahistorical terms. Instead, I posit a stratified ontology that holds to the notion that knowledge is performed, contextual, social, ideological, rhetorical, and "chronotopic"---that is, it is situated temporally, spatially, and oriented to future action. I then undertake a "chronotopic" analysis of "philosophy"---using Stuart Hall's notion of articulation---and I argue that the major stake in the debate on African philosophy is the struggle for cultural capital. I argue that it is this struggle for cultural capital that appears symptomatically in African philosophical discourse in the form of proclamations of the superiority of "Western philosophy" over "indigenous African philosophy," or vice versa; and the privileging of "literacy" to "orality," or vice versa.;I then suggest an alternative normative vision---which I call a rhetorical praxis---that emphasizes three principal articulations. First, the practice of a critical contextual epistemology that accounts for disciplinary and institutional histories and situates these in relation to other institutional and political sites. Second, action against the mechanisms through which cultural capital is generated and reified. Third, the enactment and performance of different intellectual and social relations predicated on principles and structures based on wisdom, peace, justice, and love.