| Like some feminists, we are (1) urging our readers to examine philosophical theses in the context of specific cultures and (2) encouraging philosophers to abandon certain individualistic assumptions and Cartesian themes. For example, it is inappropriate to attribute a Cartesian dualism to the Akans of Africa as some have done, since the linguistic and logical evidence adduced in favor of substance dualism is absent from Akan language and thought. Nor is it appropriate to attribute physicalism to these Africans because, on the Akan conception, there are quasi-physical entities and the mind is a capacity rather than an entity. In examining philosophical theses in some feminist and African 'cultures', the resultant philosophy of mind provides data for (i) a cultural expression of the concept of a person, (ii) a competing theory rivaling dualism as well as various versions of physicalism, and (iii) a universal conception of a person consistent with the analytic tradition.;The suggestion, here, is that the problem of philosophy in the twentieth century is not that it embraced the analytic philosopher's ideal, but that it failed to separate the ideal from the reality. The import of this particular "feminist-African critique" is to (1) urge us to separate the ideal, which in this case is a universal conception of a person, from the reality which consists of cultural conceptions of a person, and (2) use comparative philosophy to move from the reality to an approximation of the ideal. By relating philosophical theses to the language and culture in which they are proposed, we can avoid gross generalization, provincialism, and ethnocentricism without giving up analytic philosophy. A close examination of the philosophy of mind suggest that if, in doing philosophy we seek either to understand or change the world or even to have a meaningful conversation with people, then we have to do more comparative studies of philosophical theses. |
