Believing that the intellectual enterprise called philosophy is
essentially a part of the cultural as well as historical experience of a
people, that the concepts and problems that occupy the attention of
philosophers placed in different cultural spaces or historical times
generally derive directly from those spaces and times, and that
philosophy, in turn, has been most relevant to the development of human
cultures, the Ghanaian philosopher Kwame Gyekye gives reflective
attention in this book to some of the concepts and problems that in his
view feature most prominently in the contemporary African cultural,
social, political, and moral experience. Such concepts and problems
include the following: political legitimacy, development, culture and
the pursuit of science and technology, political corruption, democracy,
representation and the politics of inclusion, the status of cultural
values in national orientation, understanding globalization, and others.
It is these topics that are covered in the essays collected in this
book. The unrelenting pursuit of the speculative activity by the
philosopher in most cases eventuates in normative proposals; these
normative proposals often embody a vision-a vision of an ideal human
society in terms of its values, politics, and culture. Vision,
understood here, has human-not supernatural or divine-origination and
involvement and requires action by human beings in order for it to come
into reality. A vision may derive from sustained critical evaluation of
a culture or some elements of it. Gyekye attempts an articulation of the
visions of the essays contained in the book. Even though philosophical
ideas and concerns are originally inspired by and worked out in a
cultural milieu, it does not necessarily follow, Gyekye strongly
believes, that the relevance of those ideas and insights is to be
tetheed to the cultures that produced them. For, more often than not,
the relevance of those ideas, or at least some of them, transcends the
confines of their own times and cultures and can be appreciated by other
societies, or cultures, or generational epochs. This trans-cultural or
trans-epochal or metacontextual appeal or attraction of philosophical
ideas and insights spawned by a particular culture or cluster of
cultures or in specific historical times is to be put down to our common
human nature-including our basic human desires and aspirations. Th us,
most of the essays published here should be of interest to the global
community-i.e., to cultures and societies beyond the African.
