Menkiti on Community and Becoming a Person

Edwin Etieyibo is professor of philosophy at the University of the Witwatersrand. Polycarp Ikuenobe is professor of philosophy at Kent State University.

This collection of essays constitute testaments to the depth of a foremost contemporary African philosopher’s reflections on one of the most important issues which determine the direction/quality of human existence as a gregarious being. Are human beings atoms and individuals, with no connections or obligations to any other, but the self? Or, are human beings the products of families, communities, and societies and, therefore, beings that bear responsibility for the well-being of others as well as of self? As humanity navigates the 21st century, coming from the declining fortunes of destructively dominant Western traditions which privilege violence, inequality, and bigotry of all forms, centering African understanding of personhood as a social, community-based being—local and global—is a project which harkens back to the role Africa has placed in birthing human civilization and which has ensured the survival of post-apartheid South Africa grounded in Ubuntu philosophy. The essays in this volume will continue to serve as reference markers for scholarship and research into African/global humanity in the years and decades to come.

• PrefaceIntroductionEdwin Etieyibo and Polycarp IkuenobeChapter 1: Caught Between Two Manifestos: Menkiti and an Attempt at a MediationDismas A. MasoloChapter 2: Discussions of African Communitarianism with Specific Reference to Menkiti and RawlsBarry HallenChapter 3: Persons and CitizensKatrin FlikschuhChapter 4: The Sociality of PersonsEdwin EtieyiboChapter 5: Personal Persistence and Narrative Unity: The Case of Ancestral PersonsOritsegbubemi Anthony Oyowe Chapter 6: Menkiti’s Account of the Social Ontology of African Community and Persons Polycarp IkuenobeChapter 7: African Communitarianism and the Imperative for Moral EducationMichael Onyebuchi Eze Chapter 8: Community, Individuality, and Reciprocity in MenkitiThaddeus MetzChapter 9: Elderhood and Ancestorhood: Exemplar of a Person in African Community Polycarp Ikuenobe and Edwin EtieyiboChapter 10: An Outline of Menkiti’s Metaphysical CommitmentBernard MatolinoChapter 11: Personhood and State Building in AfricaEmmanuel Ifeanyi AniChapter 12: I Can’t Unless You CanHelen LauerChapter 13: Before a Common Soil: Personhood, Community and the Duty to Bear WitnessUchenna OkejaChapter 14: Who Gets a Place in Person-Space?Simon Beck and Oritsegbubemi Anthony OyoweChapter 15: Menkiti as a Man of CommunityEdwin EtieyiboAfterwordAbout the Contributors