This article examines an Africana philosophy of culture of black existence through, after offering a critique of a theodicy of textuality and social reality, exploration of the construction of “problem people,” of people whose existence, marked by blackness, has been treated as a challenge to reason and the search for knowledge in the modern world. As Africana philosophy raises concerns of philosophical anthropology, philosophy of freedom, and a metacritique of reason, it offers, as well, a case for the central importance of philosophy of culture in modern and late modern thought.

This paper investigates the idea of rum as an ontology of life. More specifically, it explores the rum as metaphor in the context of Africana existential ontology. Here it is argued that rum drinking can serve as the basis for understanding and conceptualizing certain basic structures of human existence in the Caribbean mode of existence. In pursuing these tasks, ontology is not construed as the study of the kinds of entities that exist; rather, ontology is given an existential twist in the sense of focusing on patterns of human existence, as well as practices that are indicative of human creative agency.

The article approaches the educational potential of aesthetics and the arts by reviving the notion of Bildung and suggesting an interpretation that emphasizes both its social character and the role of artworks and other aesthetic expressions. Bildung is a dialogic process where human relationships are crucial both for the exchange and the birth of insights. Artworks are described as images (Bilde), which act as intermediaries and points of reference in expressing, communicating and negotiating cultural values. In developing the argument, Immanuel Kant’s analysis of aesthetic judgment is read together with his ideas on enlightenment, highlighting the social and political character of judgment. Wilhelm von Humboldt’s discussion of the aesthetic and social dimensions of Bildung provides another starting point. Two examples of contemporary artistic processes are used to indicate the educational and political relevance of art in our time.

A lady, a mare, a lire and a vase are the examples chosen by Hippias Major to reply Socrates’ questions on beauty. These illustrate the fact that the debate on issues related to aesthetics began from the most concrete situations and basic items we may encounter day by day. In this paper I will consider two rudimentary events lacking any of the qualities traditionally considered aesthetic; items that have no elegance, grace or style and are not original, creative or expressive. These plain, simple objects and situations do not intend to incite contemplation because they do not conform to any model of art or beauty nor manifest syntactic or semantic complexity. I am referring to the most prosaic and yet capable of inducing a deep aesthetic response akin to that conveyed by traditional aesthetic objects. A difficult case to argue but for a quality which, despite being entirely ignored by western aesthetic theory, is still worth of regard. This quality may be defined as earthiness or the tellurian, a sensuous and symbolic celebration of sheer materiality in everyday life.

The purpose of this paper is to present some recent main evolutions which affected Philosophy in Africa. These evolutions are marked by the decline of ideals which emerged during the Bandung era. Such ideals concerned Liberation and Emancipation, Progress. This supposed the future affirmation of Africa as a strategic pole of power. In this perspective, Philosophy and social sciences had an important role to play. There was a consensus on the fact that philosophy could be an instrument of liberation and emancipation and a major factor of social, cultural and political change.

But new paradigms emerged with globalization and its cultural logics known as postmodernism/postcolonialism. For instance, this conducted some thinkers to substitute hermeneutics, interpretation and language to the theories based on the intelligibility of the real and the necessity to transform it. This explains on the one hand the delegitimation of some main categories of modernity such as Reason, History, Nation, State, Emancipation, Progress, etc., and on the other hand, the affirmation of new alternatives on terms of Desire, Fluidity, Hybridism, Diversity, Ethnicity, all crowned by the theory of Empire. In this paper, I try to confront these recent trends in African Philosophy and the earlier trends which emerged from the fight against colonialism and imperialism in Asia, Latin America and Africa.

Departing from Charles Taylor’s statement that philosophy is inescapably historical, the paper tries to examine several attempts to write the history of African philosophy. It notes that contrary to the experience of many other regional philosophies there is yet no comprehensive history of African philosophy which takes full account of its the different spectrums and periods. A good number of authors who have tried to recount the history of African philosophy have dwelt only on aspects or periods of that philosophy thus precluding the advantage of presenting African philosophy as a coherent whole. An examination of the weakness and the strong points of some of these works leads to the assertion of the necessity of comprehensive history of African philosophy, as well as a weighing of the possible reasons why no serious attempt have been made in that direction. Writing such a work will be the last complement of the History of Africa.

The author sketches the development of the relationship between art and aesthetics in the past four decades. He takes as his starting point the change that artists established in the sixties in relation to philosophical aesthetics. He argues that 1980 represented a historical threshold as concerns transformations both in art and its philosophy. He then discusses three theories of art and aesthetics— Nicolas Bourriaud’s “relational aesthetics” from the nineties, Jacques Rancière’s aesthetic project from the following decade, and the very recent “theory of contemporary art” developed by Terry Smith. In the author’s opinion, these three aesthetic or art theories not only disprove the pervasive opinion that contemporary aesthetics understood as philosophy of art is once more separated from contemporary art and the art world, but also manifest their factual import and impact in contemporary discussions on art.

The main thesis of this paper is that art has an important role to play in the fulfillment of the promises of historical progress and that this progress is the necessary condition of the flourishing of the art of the future. We make progress in economic history because we improve the productivity of our labor by inventions and cooperation. Its aim is the liberation from the necessity of labor. However, the leisure time we thus gain has to be filled with meaningful activities. Here art has to play a central role.

To show this I have to determine what art is. In my view, art is a close cousin of playing games. Arts and games have in fact a common ancestor: the feast. Both are executed freely according to self-invented rules. This explains why arts and games yield us extraordinary, quasi divine, pleasures.

Therefore indulging in art and playing games allows us in the best possible way to fill our ever larger leisure time with meaningful activities. However, this role belongs to the art of the future, i.e. the art after the end of the history of art. I explain the features of this art and its role in my last chapter.

The debates concerning what ought to be the nature and orientations of African philosophy are long drawn-out. These debates reflect the different conceptual approaches to the invention of contemporary practices of African philosophy between Anglophone and Francophone modes of philosophizing. This article reflects on these differences as well the continuing problems of creating modern African philosophical traditions. In doing so, it demonstrates why some methodological presuppositions are inadequate in grappling with some forms of sociality and the more general dilemmas of modernity and also applauds the efforts of some contemporary African thinkers who have adopted a multidisciplinary approach to overcome internal discursive limitations within the field.

The article deals with race relations in Brazil, analyzing how adult and children’s literature in Brazil has worked to maintain and update the “Prospero complex”. The article is guided by the hypothesis that the main challenge is to mover narratives, literature and textbooks to go beyond the homogeneity of a single story based on white as representative “natural” of the human species that discursively places the “other” as “deviant”; from the hegemony of the white hierarchy for plural discourses. In Brazilian literature racial hierarchies are largely profuse and profound. The analysis of “the Negro as an object” indicates the presence of some striking black characters as the few characters with a tendency to subordination and inferiority. The alternatives are linked to the “black literature” that demonstrates richness and strength but at the same time this literature is maintained as “marginal.” In children’s literature the process is very similar, observing continuous forms of hierarchy of whites as superior and blacks as inferior. The article discusses the production of alternatives and other new literary discourses and the need for teacher training.

After modernist formalism, contemporary artworks are often assigned a critic function: they are said to “question”, “reconsider”, “call for reflection” on the world… Such formulas refer to the Socratic foundation of philosophy, whereas the philosopher was the one who brought to light the fragility of opinions, discovered prejudices, undid ordinary beliefs and convictions that were not grounded in reason.

Thus, after the preeminence of philosophy on art, as in the philosophical systems that dominated the 19 th century, we observe nowadays a predominance of art on philosophy’s very task, that is, critical questioning. This paper attempts to reconstruct the historical origin of this new theoretical attitude, and to evaluate its pertinence through an examination of the conditions under which art can carry out such critical programme.

The following paper highlights the way in which contemporary analytic or Anglo-American aesthetics neglects the topic of aesthetic experience. The paper briefly examines the historical background to this situation. It also looks at how analytic aesthetics’ preoccupation with the topic of art is largely responsible for this neglect. It concludes by arguing that most of the fundamental problems in aesthetics, including those that contemporary analytic aesthetics does concern itself with, must remain intractable without a better understanding of aesthetic experience per se.