The parallels between process metaphysics and African metaphysics

Abstract

African conceptions of reality have been judged by some African scholars to be starkly different from the mainstream and dominant substance metaphysics that operates in the Euro-American philosophic tradition. These scholars stress relationality and becoming with the understanding that reality is a web of interconnected activities. In addition, some of them also articulate how classical logic and laws of thought are not helpful for properly understanding the concepts of reality in African thought. In this article, I limit my assessment to four of these African scholars: Innocent Asouzu, Mogobe Ramose, Sophie Oluwole, and Ada Agada. I uncover how the two chief contentions among them—emphasis on reality as becoming and the limitations of classical logic—for expressing reality are neither entirely unheard of nor limited to African metaphysics, as these two themes are also present in Alfred North Whitehead's philosophy of organism. But none of these thinkers are familiar with Whitehead and his works. I argue for why process metaphysics and African metaphysics share a similar history of misrepresentation and rejection as well as how an alternative system of logic is central for making sense of the contentions of these traditions.