The Politics against African Philosophy (PAAP) and it Effects

The existence of PAAP in philosophy education is evident in the conventional curriculum of philosophy in most parts of the world, including in Africa. Both indigenous philosophers from Africa and elsewhere have attested to it.^{Footnote 10} The prevailing curriculum of philosophy education in most institutions of formal education in Europe and North America, as well as the Western-founded/Western-oriented institutions in Africa, is significantly Western, both in terms of content and approach and this has had a telling effect on the quality of philosophy graduates produced in these institutions. For example, according to Rorty, one who is groomed in continental traditions ends up deficient in the analytic tradition and vice versa due to sheer discrimination between these two traditions.^{Footnote 11} Indeed, the lop-sided content of philosophy curriculum may be an instance of what Chimamanda Adichie calls the ‘danger of a single story’^{Footnote 12} about the nature of philosophy—the Western story. It is mainly stuffed with the ideas of prominent Western philosophers concerning metaphysics, epistemology, axiology, logic, politics, and so on. The study of philosophy as an academic discipline in either the West or Africa is more or less a proper soaking and tanning in the intellectual heritage of the West. We think that the discrimination against African philosophical traditions, which exacerbates this lop-sidedness, should be discontinued. Trailing the fact that every individual approaches reality with a given methodological disposition and a particular conceptual scheme; and the methodological disposition and conceptual scheme of a given scholar is often impressed on the scholar through his/her formal training or orientation, the use of a predominantly Western curriculum in the professional training of philosophers flows from, as well as consolidates, the original presumption that philosophy is solely an intellectual heritage of the West.^{Footnote 13} Janz has described this Western pretension in which the European mind-view is taken to be synonymous with the idea of universal reason.^{Footnote 14} It is up to other cultures to ape the West or be left behind. In this connection, Barry Hallen writes:

It is pertinent to note that everyone currently teaching academic philosophy in Africa received their training either in a Western or Western-oriented institution. These institutions from their inception were designed to employ a philosophy curriculum that presents philosophy as purely a Western heritage. Thanks to their professional training, what the first team of philosophers from Africa who kick-started academic philosophy in universities in Africa did was to introduce, develop, and entrench Western philosophy in Africa with the belief that philosophy is but Western philosophy.^{Footnote 16} In adopting a curriculum of philosophy that is Western, higher institutions in Africa also succeeded in grooming many erudite philosophers who cannot be properly described as ‘African philosophers’ but ‘philosophers from Africa.’^{Footnote 17}

For some African philosophers such as Paulin Hountondji the terms—African philosopher and philosophers from Africa—are necessarily synonymous.^{Footnote 18} This is because, for him, the philosophical works of every philosopher from Africa (irrespective of its content) constitute African philosophy and the philosophical works of philosophers who are not from Africa cannot be part of African philosophy. The problem with this understanding of African philosophy is that it suggests that African philosophy is not a universal academic discipline that can be studied and developed by any philosopher who wishes to, irrespective of racial background. For this, Jonathan Chimakonam has accused Hountondji of what he calls “Hountondji’s Dilemma”—i.e., on the one hand, indicating that philosophy is a universal discipline to which anyone can participate and, on the other, suggesting that African philosophy cannot be done by non-Africans.^{Footnote 19} Contrary to the position of Hountondji, Odera Oruka upholds the right of non-Africans to practise African philosophy insofar as they are versed in Africa’s cultural and intellectual life.^{Footnote 20} Corroborating Oruka, we hold that not every philosopher from Africa is an expert in African philosophy. This is because most philosophers in/from Africa were/are professionally trained to do Western philosophy. Without a personal research interest and industry in African philosophy, a contemporary philosopher from Africa or in Africa is at best a Western philosopher from/in Africa. Professional philosophers by their very training in Africa, Asia, Europe, or the Americas, suffer from circumstantial ignorance about African philosophy.^{Footnote 21} Their foundational training gives them little or no substantive exposure to African philosophy traditions. The effects of this anomaly are many and varied.

The training of Western philosophers in institutions of learning that use a predominantly Western curriculum infuse in them a sense of superiority that gives them the requisite self-confidence to think, articulate, and present the products of their critical reflections and systematic argumentations on any phenomenon as the universal standpoint, even if such a person has not left her/his country of birth. For example, the title and content of the multi-volume history of philosophy by Frederick Copleston is quite informative.^{Footnote 22} Inherent in this approach is the view that other peoples of the world like the Africans lacked the capacity to philosophize until their contact with the European world. African philosophy, for example, is presumed to be non-existent and impossible. What exists is philosophy in Africa or philosophy by Africans. They are respectively the study of Western philosophy in Africa and the contributions of Western-trained African-born philosophers to the development of Western philosophy.

This is problematic because the training of Africans in institutions that use an exclusively or predominantly Western curriculum alienates them from their cultural roots. This alienation often leads to prolonged ‘mental incarceration’ that ‘twists their cultural spine’^{Footnote 23} thereby inflicting them with what Emefiena Ezeani calls ‘colonialysis’—a pathological inferiority complex (occasioned by the invasion of Africa and the mis-education of the Africans by European powers) that influences them to habitually adopt and use whatever treatise their colonizers bequeathed to them with the view that the colonizer’s treatise on every subject is the only ideal, legitimate, universal, and absolute standard.^{Footnote 24} Other philosophical traditions could obtain a stamp of authenticity only by identifying with the Greco-European logos. This is what Tsenay Serequeberhan describes as “the ultimate veracious buttress of European conquest.”^{Footnote 25} This conquest is the domination and subjugation of African thought by European philosophy in which the former must completely ape the latter or lose authenticity. Hence, the first book that explicitly suggested that there is African philosophy ignited what we have come to know in African philosophy as the Great Debate—the polemical contestations on the existence and possibility of African philosophy that occurred between the 1960s and the early 1990s. Moses A. Makinde observes that, even the staunchest proponents of African philosophy do African philosophy only in their publications, symposia, and conference papers. In their lecture halls, they teach mainly Western philosophy. In most cases, it is taught without an explicit connection to the African life-world.^{Footnote 26} In this way, it becomes really difficult to identify African philosophy among the ideas they discuss.

Furthermore, the absence or very thin introduction of African philosophy to undergraduate students of philosophy affects the quality of graduate students and even teachers of African philosophy. Thus most professional philosophers who decide to pursue a career in African philosophy somehow do this in the fashion of Western philosophy measured by the Western paradigm.^{Footnote 27} PAAP, therefore, limits the scope of one’s mental horizon, suppresses freedom of thought, discourages diversity and stifles the emergence of novel ideas both for the African and the Western iconoclast. In doing this, PAAP vitiates what Chimakonam calls the “Global Expansion of Thought” (GET)^{Footnote 28} for sustainable intercultural discourse. It makes it very difficult for humanity to be able to access, explore, understand, and exploit the rich intellectual heritage of Africa.

The end result of the prolonged exclusion and then marginalization of African philosophy is the under-exploration, misinterpretation, and under-development of the rich intellectual heritage of Africa.^{Footnote 29} This exclusion or marginal representation of the intellectual heritage of Africa in philosophy education hinders the proper development of the intellect through selective exposure to privileged positions. It is an instance of what Miranda Fricker calls ‘epistemic injustice.’^{Footnote 30} By this, Fricker could be pointing to the professionally unethical way in which a dominant tradition that enjoys hegemony sidelines and denigrates other epistemic perspectives. In this connection, epistemic injustice amounts to doing wrong to someone as it concerns his/her capacity as a knower. That is to say, by wrongfully (in term of professional ethics) undermining a person’s capacity as a knower, a dominant tradition discriminates against other people’s epistemic perspective. Going further, Fricker identifies two kinds of epistemic injustice, namely, testimonial injustice and hermeneutical injustice. The former occurs when prejudice influences one’s judgements about the epistemic viability of the other’s position, while the latter “occurs at a prior stage, when a gap in collective interpretive resources puts someone at an unfair disadvantage when it comes to making sense of their social experiences.”^{Footnote 31} Both forms of epistemic injustices are inflicted on African philosophers. As Rainer Forst notes, “The victim of injustice is not primarily the person who lacks certain goods, but the one who does not ‘count’ in the production and distribution of goods.”^{Footnote 32} With the marginalization of the epistemic perspective from Africa, it appears that Africa does not count in the epistemic formations in world philosophy.^{Footnote 33} Perhaps the aforementioned reasons are responsible for the call to decolonize philosophy education in Africa. But what does it mean to decolonize the philosophy curriculum and how can it be done?

On Decolonizing Philosophy Education in Africa and Beyond

The concept of decolonization became topical in the 1960s when different countries under colonial rule were achieving political independence. However, the concept may mean two different things. For the colonial powers, it may mean just the withdrawal of political control by a colonial power from a colony. Decolonization for those who endured colonial rule, by contrast, may transcend political independence and capture social, economic, cultural, and even educational independence. Full decolonization involves a systematic restructuring and possibly purgation of colonial ideas and the restoration of traditional order or, the creation of new but culturally inspired ideas for the purpose of displacing the colonial narrative and its intellectual hegemony. In postcolonial Africa, this can and is being done in many fields beyond the discipline of philosophy and its curriculum.

Generally, curriculum decolonization has to do with “undermining ‘knowledge hegemony’ and diversifying the curriculum in respect of knowledge paradigms and systems.”^{Footnote 34} In the African context, curriculum decolonization is often interpreted as Africanizing the curriculum. This is because the conventional curriculum in Africa and elsewhere is a colonial one. However, decolonization and Africanization are not identical. This point will become clearer when we discuss the models for Africanizing the philosophy curriculum in Africa. It is important to note that what we are arguing for in this paper is decolonizing rather than Africanizing the philosophy curriculum per se.

Although most scholars agree that the conventional curriculum of philosophy is in dire need of transformation, how the curriculum should be transformed is a controversial issue, with some tilting toward Africanization while others favour decolonization. Views favouring Africanization can be roughly grouped into the three models articulated by Chimakonam, namely, the B-model, D-model, and C-model.^{Footnote 35}

The B-model stands for a ‘narrative of balance.’ Proponents of this model call for a balanced philosophy curriculum in institutions of learning in Africa; “one can think of a procedure which adjusts the philosophy curricular in universities in Africa in such a way that there is a balance between courses in both Western and African philosophies.”^{Footnote 36} The D-model stands for a ‘narrative of displacement.’ Proponents of the D-model call for “the development of a complete set of African philosophy curriculum to displace the existing curricular in universities in Africa which are structured with courses in Western philosophy.”^{Footnote 37} The last, C-model, stands for a ‘narrative of competition.’ Proponents of the C-model argue for the use of two different curricula for a period of time and then the use of whichever proves to be more resourceful for Africa in the long run. In the words of Chimakonam:

Proponents of the C-model are thus not necessarily calling for decolonization per se. They are looking for a philosophy curriculum that “commands greater intellectual advantage for Africans.” The fact that such a curriculum is either African or Western seems to be inconsequential.

Chimakonam himself once proposed the C-model to the University of Calabar, but he is also sympathetic to the B-model. Which model is superior, in the final analysis, he leaves “the judgment to the reader and invite[s] colleagues to further engage with this question.”^{Footnote 39}

In calling for the replacement of the Western curriculum with an African curriculum, the D-model advocates for Africanization rather than decolonization. It fails to understand the truth in the saying that ‘two wrongs cannot make a right.’ We are living in a necessarily interconnected and interdependent global village that is inherently heterogeneous. There is no culturally homogenous and self-contained country anywhere in the contemporary world. It is thus “no longer enough to study the philosophy of a given place; it is of utmost importance to also study a bit of the philosophies of other places as well.”^{Footnote 40} This point was also made strongly by Rorty in criticizing the increasing divide between the analytic and the continental traditions.^{Footnote 41} The use of any homogeneous curriculum, be it Western or African, will be ethnocentric and counterproductive. The D-model is as inadequate as the existing Western-biased model, for the same reason. The only advantage the D-model might have over the existing Western model is that it will help to re-connect Africans to their rich intellectual heritage and thereby boost their self-confidence. Left unchecked, however, this advantage would probably metamorphose into a form of ethnocentrism, romanticism, and even racism. Besides, the D-model is exclusive, disjunctive, and fragmentary in nature. These attributes have been widely adjudged as alien to the African thought system, which is said to be fundamentally complementary and conjunctive.^{Footnote 42} We also distance ourselves from the C-model for further reasons. First, it is indifferent to the question of decolonization. Second, its basic driving principle, which is the principle of the survival of the fittest, encourages hegemony. Third, if the consensus that the existing Western-dominated model is inadequate, it is illogical to waste scarce resources experimenting on it again as the C-model tends to propose. The logical thing to do would be to experiment on the exclusively African alternative as proposed by the D-model. In all, both the D-model and the C-model necessarily encourage rather than undermine ‘knowledge hegemony,’ epistemic injustice, and the politics of exclusion and marginalization. As a ‘narrative of balance,’ by contrast, the B-model appears to be against knowledge hegemony, epistemic injustice, and the politics of exclusion and marginalization. But the proponents of this model often restrict the scope of what is to be balanced to Western and African philosophy.^{Footnote 43} One wonders why one must leave out Eastern philosophy and other philosophical traditions. Why should students of philosophy in Africa and elsewhere be denied the opportunity to explore philosophical ideas from the intellectual history of Asia, Latin America, and other philosophically less popular regions? The B-model is, therefore, not comprehensive enough. A balanced philosophy curriculum should contain ideas in all traditions of philosophy across the globe. Only in this way can Chimakonam’s interesting idea of the GET—a form of intercultural synchronization of ideas from different philosophical places—be actualized.

Given the inadequacies of existing models, we propose an alternative called a ‘narrative of pluralism’ (or the P-model).^{Footnote 44} Here, we develop the P-model to complement Chimakonam’s original taxonomy.

Proponents of the P-model as we employ it here would argue that a decolonized curriculum of philosophy in Africa or elsewhere should as a rule include ideas from different traditions and the best philosophical works that have been done on basic subjects, topics, and issues in different areas of philosophy by a variety of authors. The P-model as a curriculum of philosophy will accommodate courses from different traditions and present the history of philosophy from the perspective of different cultures. It will not present the history of, say, Western philosophy as an absolute singular history of philosophy. In the P-model, we shall have a pluralistic account of the history of philosophy that includes African, Western, Asian, American, and Latin American philosophy. Authors shall be studied from two dimensions, namely, from the tradition they represent and from the hermeneutical perspectives of other traditions. Hermeneutic is a strong feature in the P-model because it will serve as a string connecting different ideas, theories, texts, and topics in different traditions. Also, the mechanism for the delivery of the P-model will be intercultural philosophy with conversational thinking as its preferred methodology. By ‘conversational thinking,’ we mean that such a curriculum should enable teachers and students to interrogate ideas constructed in, or embedded in, different philosophical traditions in relation to the needs of their immediate society at a particular point in time. It should also enable them to converse critically and creatively with established positions in different philosophical traditions, enabling thereby development of a better-informed one.

Our hunch is that strict adherence to any of the two established traditions in Western philosophy (the analytic and the continental traditions) as well as the two predominant schools in African philosophy (the Universalist and the Particularist schools) is antithetical to the P-model. The defining stance of these traditions and schools tends to be fragmentary, lop-sided, rigid, and conclusive in nature. ‘The politics of philosophy’ is the logical offspring of strict fidelity to traditions/schools of philosophy that are dichotomizing, discriminating, and hegemonic, which leads to various epistemic injustices. The widely acknowledged strife between analytic and continental traditions in Western philosophy buttresses this point.^{Footnote 45} Philosophers who received their formal training in institutions that follow the analytic tradition are often indoctrinated to see continental philosophy as an inferior tradition and vice versa. We use the term ‘indoctrination’ because such philosophers often do not arrive at their convictions after a careful examination of the tradition in which they were; it is often, instead, a product of their formal training rather than a reasoned conclusion.

Against this backdrop, it is only logical to expect that a decolonized curriculum yielded by the P-model should be a product of a comprehensive, complementary, and dynamic tradition of philosophy that is by nature culturally heterogeneous, and postcolonial in both content and approach. If a curriculum does not include epistemic perspectives from diverse traditions, it is inadequate. We thus propose an intercultural tradition of philosophy to be known as the ‘conversational tradition’ of philosophy in which diverse traditions exchange ideas on an equal playing field. We next articulate the nature and the fundamental standpoints of this new cross-cultural tradition of philosophy.

Toward a Conversational Tradition of Philosophy: Nature and Justification

The conversational tradition of philosophy that we propose here is an offspring of conversational philosophy as conceived by Chimakonam^{Footnote 46} and endorsed by the Conversational School of Philosophy.^{Footnote 47} According to Chimakonam, conversational philosophy is a strictly formal intellectual engagement between or among proponents and defenders of specific thoughts at micro or macro levels in which critical and rigorous questioning creatively unveils new concepts, opens up new vistas for thought, and sustains the conversation while avoiding a telos.^{Footnote 48} What this entails is that conversational engagement does not prioritize results; it focuses on the sustenance of the encounter at both micro (individual) and macro (intercultural or group) levels.

Chimakonam borrows the term ‘conversational philosophy’ from Rorty.^{Footnote 49} However, Chimakonam employs it in a different way that is theoretic and speaks to the idea of philosophy across borders. In Rorty’s use, conversational philosophy simply is a substitute name for continental philosophy.^{Footnote 50} Hence, he writes: “I suggest we drop the term ‘continental’ and instead contrast analytic philosophy with conversational philosophy.”^{Footnote 51} The idea behind this manoeuver, it seems, is to eliminate the unhelpful cultural conflict between the analytic and the continental traditions among Western premier universities where the structuring of philosophy curriculum along the line of one or the other has restricted the depth of philosophy education. Rorty thus suggests that graduates of philosophy in the West as a result of this polarity are adept in either analytic tradition or continental tradition but almost totally ignorant in the other. It, therefore, seems timely to ask: what has happened to the old idea that philosophy is the mother of all disciplines and that the philosopher is the ombudsman of knowledge? If, having fragmented the discipline into rival, irreconcilable traditions, whose borders no apprenticing or practicing philosopher dares cross, how then will philosophers live up to their name as wise persons or lovers of wisdom? Part of our goal in this work is to transcend the arena of Western philosophy to which Rorty restricted his concern and think of philosophy in the world at large.

Rorty’s notion of conversational philosophy remains unsatisfactory so long as it sustains the exclusivist, fragmentary, and hegemonic orientation that gave birth to such unhealthy dichotomies in the world philosophy such as: analytic/continental, Western/African, Western/Asian, Western and the Rest, etc. The main justification for this work, therefore, is the attempt to eliminate such dichotomies and construct a unified philosophical tradition out of which a comprehensive curriculum of philosophy education may be articulated. The other justification is that, by so doing, we may be able to stop those continuing epistemic injustices in which one determinate tradition masquerades as universal by either imposing its cultural particulars on the rest or denigrating other traditions as inferior.

Conversational thinking as we conceive it speaks to a strategy of exchange derived from an under-explored African notion of ‘relationship’ that undergirds the method of African philosophy teased out of the world-view that reality exists as a network in which everything depends on everything else. Basic to African thought is the view that relationships of mutual interconnection, interdependence, and interrelation are fundamental to existence. A good number of African thinkers have appealed to this idea of relationship in developing various theories and principles in African philosophy.^{Footnote 52} What we want to highlight about this idea of relationship is that it presents ontology as a network in which there is no superior/inferior divide. What we have is a relationship of mutual complementarity in which the equality of being in whatever manifestation is recognized.

Also, the conversational relationship is not a dialectic relationship in which components of thesis and anti-thesis come together to form a synthesis. It is rather an arumaristic^{Footnote 53} relationship in which the struggle between thesis and anti-thesis is not merely between two competing positions that inevitably culminates in the emergence of a new position (synthesis) made up of the components of the two rivals. In an arumaristic relationship, there is, no doubt, a certain degree of epistemological alignment between two seemingly opposed variables (thesis and anti-thesis) but fundamental differences will always persist due to opposing ontological loyalties of the proponents. This perpetuates the reshuffling of thesis and anti-thesis and frustrates the emergence of synthesis initially expected. What happens in such a relationship within the framework of conversational thinking can be described as complementation rather than as synthesis.

It should also be noted that conversational thinking is not the same as hermeneutics, which deals with textual interpretations usually in a critical fashion. Conversationalists do not interpret; they engage the other, attempt to establish the weaknesses in the other’s position that might compel the other to either revise or abandon her/his position and this strategy might lead to the creation of new concepts and ideas. Similarly, conversational thinking^{Footnote 54} is not the same as the method of analysis. While the latter, among others, is a linguistic strategy aimed at analyzing concepts from macro to micro and treating the philosophical problematic as generational, the former focuses on argument structures and treats the philosophical problematic as transgenerational.^{Footnote 55}

The conversational tradition we propose is inclusive and complementary in nature. It recognizes the existence of different traditions of philosophy in different places and argues that all these different traditions house ideas that can be critically and creatively harnessed in an intercultural setting for the benefit of humanity. To develop this new tradition, we harvested ideas from different traditions. For example, we take the idea of critical analysis from the analytic tradition; we take the idea of transgenerational formulation of problematics from the continental tradition; we take the idea of result-orientedness from the American tradition; we take the idea of common destiny from the Asian tradition; we take the idea of mutual exchange and cooperation from the Latin American tradition, and we take the idea of relationship from the African tradition, etc. Thus, in a conversational tradition, none of the different traditions is in itself inferior or superior to the others, and so none should be jettisoned as illegitimate or accepted as sacrosanct. They should all be studied with open minds in search of plausible ideas for the progressive development of the intellectual heritage of humanity. What then are the basic standpoints of the conversational tradition of philosophy we propose?

We want to enunciate two main principles of the conversational tradition of philosophy, namely, conversational tradition as multicultural (the M-principle) and conversational tradition as transcultural (the T-principle).

The M-principle: A conversational tradition of philosophy is necessarily multicultural. This is akin to the narrative of pluralism (P-model of philosophy curriculum) discussed above. It implies that not only is there room for every culture; there is also a horizontal relationship among all cultures in the conversation. Philosophy in our time must cross borders. But do we take our methods with us when we cross borders? Or do we weave different methods together? When we take the methods of our particular place into a different cultural place, cultural hegemony of some sort is likely to arise. Also, we will fall into the error of measuring the thoughts of others with the wrong instrument. So, we need a new and universal method that is capable of transcending various cultural centrisms. The conversational thinking that does not have the baggage of ethnocentric commitment would, therefore, be the ideal framework for reasoning at the intercultural or cross-cultural or even at the multicultural level. The basic thing in the conversational orientation is the powerful idea of relationship, which is something that can be extended to all traditions and all peoples. One fundamental thing that will keep philosophy relevant in this age and probably for all time to come is this idea of conversational relationship. Conversational relationship doesn’t happen when two or more interlocutors merely come together; rather, it is the mutual interpenetration in which X converses with Y when both adopt conversation as their method.

Our notion of relationship is something central to most human problems in our world today. A few examples include problems that result from bad relationships like terrorism, corruption, war, conflicts, violence, environmental pollution, poverty, bad leadership, etc. Indeed, human beings have not yet found a way to trivialize this notion in their day-to-day living; not even recent technological developments have severed the dependence of one human on others. If this is the case, then human mutual interdependence, interrelation, and interconnection when viewed through the lens of philosophy inevitably have to become cross-cultural. We must accept others, understand them, and be willing to engage fairly and objectively with them if we wish to have a more peaceful world. Under this connection, a good philosophy curriculum, whether crafted in the USA or in China or Nigeria in light of the conversational tradition, must accommodate perspectives from diverse cultures of philosophy. In today’s contracting geographical spaces, it has become increasingly unavoidable for people from different parts of the world to relate. There is no better way of building healthier relationships among people from different cultures than to orchestrate an exchange of their cultural philosophies. Thus Heinz Kimmerle insists “that philosophy must either become intercultural, or else become nothing more than an academic preoccupation void of societal relevance.”^{Footnote 56}

The T-principle: The conversational tradition of philosophy necessarily must be transcultural as well. One must see oneself in the other and transcend one’s own cultural centrisms in interacting with the other, and vice versa. So, in conversational tradition, there is no hegemony or lop-sidedness of the superior/inferior type. If we are to have a philosophy of the future—the type that Michel Foucault talks about when he discusses the crisis of Western thought as being identical to the end of imperialism—then the West must find a way to set aside its cultural centrism, which fuels the crisis of thought in Europe, and embrace instead the transcultural ideals of tolerance, equity, justice, and complementarity. Foucault declares the crisis of Western thought as the end of the era of Western philosophy. He predicts that if philosophy of the future exists, it must be born outside Europe.^{Footnote 57} The conversational tradition of philosophy may have been born outside Europe but it is by no means Afrocentrist. In fact, one reason that it is born outside Europe is that the notion of relationship that undergirds it is receiving the most philosophical attention in African philosophy at the moment. It is in this connection that Kimmerle explains that “the philosophical contribution to a renegotiation of the relationship between cultures is decisive for the status of philosophy today.”^{Footnote 58} The conversational tradition of philosophy that is culturally unbranded may, therefore, be one path into future philosophy.

It is when both the M-principle and the T-principle explained above are in place that conversational thinking is equipped to drive intercultural discourse. Yousefi explains that:

Although, according to Ezeani,^{Footnote 60} this faculty is not equally developed and used in all individuals and at all times, philosophy is nonetheless not the exclusive property of any nation, race, sex, or social class. It is by nature a product of a conscious, critical reflection on human experiences by people in different societies. Thus every human society has always had its own philosophers.

What the foregoing comes to is that philosophy “represents the common conversation of humankind concerning the essential questions that people have raised and attempted to answer through the ages.”^{Footnote 61} The questions and responses are as diverse as the experiences and circumstances of their authors. It must be humbly admitted though that there is no single method of philosophy that can be adjudged absolute. It is perfectly in order to talk of different methods. The conversational method can be viewed as one such method. What has to be stated here is that, amongst different methods, it may be possible to say that A is better than B in this or that respect in addressing the experiences and circumstances of human beings in different societies. Different circumstances call for different methodological dispositions and the use of different methodological dispositions often leads to different positions. It is through a rigorous critical and creative engagement with other positions embedded in different intellectual heritages of humanity that a philosopher arrives at her/his novel idea/theory for confronting certain challenges of his/her time. Every curriculum of philosophy anywhere should, therefore, be all-inclusive. Students of philosophy should be exposed to the relevant ideas on diverse issues in different philosophical traditions across the globe which may include in method: ibuanyidanda, Afro-communitarianism, conversationalism from African philosophy, etc., as well as analysis, phenomenology, and pragmatism from Western philosophy, etc. Such a curriculum will also include trends and theories in different traditions, for example, ubuntu, uwa ontology and Ezumezu from African traditions, as well as Confucianism, the categorical imperative, Hindu ethics from Western and Asian traditions, etc. Additionally, the basic concepts in philosophy such as freedom, justice, truth, rights, etc. will feature prominently in the conversational curriculum, only this time they will be studied from the epistemic perspectives of different philosophical traditions wherein the authors from these diverse traditions would be studied. Such a curriculum can undermine PAAP by developing a culture of philosophy education that accommodates as many epistemic perspectives as possible.

It is in this connection that the conversational tradition we propose agrees with the view that philosophy is a school of freedom. Explaining what this actually means, Koïchiro Matsuura writes:

The point buttressed here is that philosophy education anywhere should not be restricted to any specific tradition. The use of an inclusive curriculum of philosophy like the P-model will help to guard against diverse forms of extremism and parochial thinking among philosophers, which has taken strong root in the discipline world over. This is because such a curriculum will necessarily broaden the mental horizons of those who learn through it. In this connection, the M-principle formulated above entails that a philosophy curriculum like the P-model should necessarily feature readings from different philosophical traditions.^{Footnote 63} The M-principle thus insists that one should include relevant texts, topics, and authors from multiple traditions. The T-principle provides for a balanced study of these diverse texts, topics, and authors from different traditions. Hence, the conversational approach will take into consideration the teachings of various traditions, but of more importance is the attitude of scholars who study and teach with this transcultural philosophy curriculum named the ‘P-model.’ The T-principle entails that the deployment of such curriculum will transcend cultural centrisms or ethnocentric commitments in judging, willing, and acting towards the other texts, topics, and authors drawn from other traditions and vice versa. So, in a conversational curriculum, there is no hegemony or lop-sidedness of the superior/inferior type; instead it aims to develop richer perspectives on truth and our knowledge claims that will help to make possible the idea of GET—an intercultural development and progress of thought. In this regard, the conversational curriculum known as the P-model encourages the cross-cultural fertilization of ideas.

Admittedly, the conversational tradition of philosophy that we articulate calls for a very broad curriculum that would perhaps make the study of philosophy more demanding, in that its students would be required to cover a wide array of topics, authors, and theories from different traditions. Delivering such a curriculum might be more expensive for universities than are current curricula. Such costs might be appropriately borne if it enables its recipients to become better philosophers and the universities to become truly universal centres of learning.