PETER J. KING AND THE TRANSFORMATION OF THE PHILOSOPHICAL CANON: AN AFRICANIST APPRECIATION

Abstract

From a perspective of an advocacy for a multi-culturally sensitive epistemology, as well as from the context of the politics of decision-making on which thinkers get inaugurated into a community of what is regarded as standard-bearers of what passes as philosophy, Peter King’s One hundred philosophers: The life and work of the world’s greatest thinkers (2004) is instructive. He creatively breaks the boundaries of the traditional canonical criteria of Western philosophy and installs into a singular chronological compendium thinkers from Asia, Africa, Europe and the Americas as philosophers whose works set the frontiers of philosophic erudition. Our critical observation is that King profoundly subverts the myth and challenges the doctrine of positing European thinkers as bulwarks of a universally superior epistemic system. Drawing from the amply documented protestation of African philosophy against the supremacist tendencies of the hegemonic Western academy, as well as from Walter Mignolo’s critical framework on the proclivity of a colonial epistemology to masquerade as universal, this essay critically highlights the historico-cultural mechanisms whereby the Western philosophical tradition sets itself as the arbiter and universal measure of what passes as philosophy, or a philosopher. King’s book is presented as a commendable negation of this tendency and as a demonstration of a culturally equitable and pluraversal (as opposed to the Eurocentric universal) approach to the recognition of philosophical genius. The essay is a contribution to the demands for the transformation of the conceptualisation of philosophy in the post-colonial academy.