Jonathan O Chimakonam: intellectual biography of an African philosopher.

Abstract

This dissertation studies the life and work of Nigerian-born philosopher and logician Jonathan Okeke Chimakonam, who is currently a Professor in South Africa, and is considered a direct heir of the concepts and ideas of the debates that took place from the 1970s to 1990s on whether or not African philosophy existed. This dissertation studies that debate and tracks how the ideas and concepts from it shaped Chimakonam’s philosophical outlook. When a young Chimakonam joined the academia, he decided to focus on one existential problem: ‘Where is the African mind?’ This dissertation reads Chimakonam’s search for the African mind as the direct influence of the debate on the existence of African philosophy. As this dissertation shows, Chimakonam has argued that the greatest threat faced by Africa today is the vitiation of African thought systems along with their logic. He believes that one of the consequences of this decline is that some African leaders commit crimes and atrocities because they use Western logic. This may have been avoided if they used an African logic. To Chimakonam there was always a mismatch between African and Western logic such that anything an African does on the bedrock of Western logic will be tainted, inauthentic, and unoriginal. If Africans are seeking originality, they should base their ideas on African logic. Since Chimakonam saw this as a matter of urgency, he constructed a logic from which African systems of thought could emanate. He called the prototype of that logic Ezumezu logic. This newly drawn logic needed a methodology that explained it, and Chimakonam proposed conversational thinking, a method of philosophizing that comes from Ezumezu logic; it is a concrete way of applying Ezumezu logic. This dissertation tracks the development of Chimakonam’s idea of African philosophy which is situated in the broader debate on the rationality of Africans. It further argues that Chimakonam’s ideas on African logic can be understood to be progressing from radical relativism, which is a belief that there is a peculiar African logic inaccessible to other cultures, to a measured relativism, which is a belief that though logic may be relative it can also be universalizable.