Kwame Gyekye
The Ghanaian philosopher is a professor of Philosophy at the University of Ghana and a Visiting Professor of Philosophy and African-American studies at Temple University. He has made key contributions to the debate on African conceptions of ‘person’, personhood and communitarianism and he mostly explores how the Akan people of Ghana conceive of a person. He uses this exploration to argue that there is an African philosophy and that African philosophy can be found in part in the traditions of the cultures of African people.
Gyekye has been a Fellow of the Smithsonian Institution’s Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and is a lifetime Fellow of the Ghana Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has several works to his credit, including The Akan Concept of a person (1978), The Unexamined Life: Philosophy and the African Experience (1988) and Tradition and Modernity: Philosophical Reflections on the African Experience (1997), which offers a philosophical interpretation and critical analysis of the African cultural experience in modern times.
