Theoria

In lieu of an editorial for this issue, we interviewed our new Editor-in-Chief, Laurence Piper. In this brief conversation, he talks about his history with the journal as an editor, plans for his tenure as Editor-in-Chief, and the evolving role of the journal in the field of social and political theory, globally.

In his 2015 Theoria article titled ‘A Rejection of Humanism in African Moral Tradition’, Motsamai Molefe argues that Kwasi Wiredu's humanistic interpretation of traditional Akan ethics cannot be the best account of African ethics because Wiredu overlooks the significant sentiment in traditional African thought that regards reality as a holistic totality of spiritual, social and environmental components. I point out that Molefe's rejection of Wiredu's humanism follows from the latter's de-emphasising of supernaturalism. I argue that Molefe overlooks the fact that the displacement of God in this humanism is consistent with the limited God sentiment in traditional African thought, which confirms Wiredu's humanistic ethics as one rooted in traditional African worldviews. Adopting the method of philosophical exposition and analysis, I show how Wiredu's limited God framework motivates scepticism about the possibility of a supernaturalist ethics and renders a humanistic orientation a more attractive account of African moral tradition.

Kwasi Wiredu defines conceptual decolonisation as an activity in which Africans divest themselves of undue colonial influences, but his descriptions of this process are either unrelated to divesting or work quite generally, and not in favour of an African point of view. Wiredu's approach to decolonisation appears to be largely indistinguishable from the business of philosophy.

Oritsegbubemi Anthony Oyowe. 2022. Menkiti's Moral Man. London: Lexington Books.

Shadi Bartsch, Plato Goes to China: The Greek Classics and Chinese Nationalism. Princeton University Press, 2023, 304 pp. ISBN: 9780691229591.

John V. Garner and María-Constanza Garrido Sierralta, The Greek Imaginary: From Homer to Heraclitus, Seminars 1982–2042. Edinburgh University Press, 2023, 336 pp. ISBN: 978-1474475327.