CEPPA Talk (in-person & online) – Katrin Flikschuh (LSE)

Title: The Idea of Ancestry in African Philosophy

Abstract: This paper concerns itself with the rationality of belief in ancestral existence. Although belief in ancestral existence remains widespread globally, I shall focus on a-thinned out version of African forms of this belief. ‘Thinned-out’ in that I am not interested in this or that substantive version of the belief among different African peoples; nor am I interested in the particular cultural practises that attend or attest to the belief. I am interested in the general form of the belief, and in the more general conception of the natural world in general which one would have to endorse for belief in ancestral existence to count as rational. In one sense, the aims of this paper are quite modest: I merely aim to get clearer, myself, on what strikes me as an intuitively attractive belief. In another sense, the paper is quite ambitious: the belief would seem to require Western readers to suspend routine metaphysical and scientific assumptions about the natural order. In putting pressure on these routine assumptions, I shall touch on discussions around free will and consciousness as phenomena that share some of the features of ancestral existence. Considered comparatively, belief in ancestral existence may be no less rationally defensible than belief in free will or (non-reductive) consciousness.

Location: Edgecliffe G03