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Philosophy and Genre: Creating a Textual Basis for African Philosophy

Descripción del proyecto

La filosofía africana a través de los textos

Basándose en la elaboración de diversos géneros textuales, el proyecto financiado con fondos europeos PhiGe propone un nuevo planteamiento de la filosofía africana. La idea básica es estudiar la filosofía africana a través de fuentes del mismo continente y no como una disciplina incluida en el marco de los estudios coloniales o neocoloniales. El proyecto tendrá en cuenta una amplia gama de textos según su género: orales y escritos, de ficción y reales, y públicos y privados. El objetivo principal del proyecto es comprender el significado filosófico de los textos que se analicen. Además, aplicará un estudio comparativo de textos en ocho lenguas africanas y europeas.

Objetivo

The project pioneers a multilingual approach to African philosophy, based on an understanding of philosophy as expressed through texts. In contrast to definitions of philosophical texts as non-fictional, written sources (Hountondji), we insist on a much more inclusive definition of “text”: both oral and written texts, fictional and non-fictional ones, public and private ones are considered in this project. A rigorous study of texts, working across multiple genres and several languages, is the first step in the development of an African philosophy derived from local African cultures, rather than from global, colonial or neo-colonial concerns, as is to date the case in the “mainstream” discipline of “African Philosophy”. This project establishes such a textual basis for African philosophy. This bottom-up approach necessitates a reconsideration of the nature, methods, and themes of philosophy, but also of its textual strategies, its use of language, of the nature of representation, and of the relationship between imaginative literature and theoretical thought.

The key premise of our project is that to understand the philosophical meaning of texts, it is necessary to start with an analysis of textual genres. Genres anchor texts in context, in culture and language. How exactly does genre impact meaning? To answer this central question of our research, we work comparatively on several genres of literature in eight African and European languages. The case studies include the essay in Ciluba and French, the novel in Swahili, Shona, Ciluba, Lingala, French, and English, digital texts such as blogs and social media, scenario planning narratives, Sufi poetry in Swahili and Wolof, and Alexis Kagame’s poetic work in Kinyarwanda and French, travestying the traditional genres of dynastic, heroic and pastoral poetry.

Challenging the conventional limits of both philosophy and literature, our approach allows new, topical philosophical concerns to emerge from this textual basis.

Ámbito científico (EuroSciVoc)

CORDIS clasifica los proyectos con EuroSciVoc, una taxonomía plurilingüe de ámbitos científicos, mediante un proceso semiautomático basado en técnicas de procesamiento del lenguaje natural.

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Régimen de financiación

ERC-COG - Consolidator Grant

Institución de acogida

UNIVERSITAT BAYREUTH
Aportación neta de la UEn
€ 1 715 318,25
Dirección
UNIVERSITATSSTRASSE 30
95447 Bayreuth
Alemania

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Región
Bayern Oberfranken Bayreuth, Kreisfreie Stadt
Tipo de actividad
Higher or Secondary Education Establishments
Enlaces
Coste total
€ 1 715 318,25

Beneficiarios (2)