Groundwork for a New Kind of African Metaphysics / Progress in Mathematics (PDF)

"In this important work of African metaphysics, Aribiah David Attoe does not simply recount views typically held by indigenous sub-Saharan peoples. He instead draws on some of their salient beliefs to construct a new ontology that he argues is more attractive. Forgoing any appeal to imperceptible agency ('the spiritual'), Attoe nonetheless invokes other resources from the African metaphysical tradition, such as singularity, relationality, and destiny, to offer fresh ways to understand being, God, causation, responsibility, and death. The result is a creative materialist-determinist ontology with an African pedigree that merits serious consideration."

-Thaddeus Metz, Professor of Philosophy, University of Pretoria, South Africä

"Aribiah David Attoe makes an interesting, thought provoking, and revealing contribution to discourses in African metaphysics. His theory of predeteministic historicity is surely going to challenge longstanding conceptions of African metaphysics, and it promises novel ways to imagine some of our basic beliefs in relation to God, ancestors, causality, relationality, death and determinism."

-Motsamai Molefe, Senior Researcher, University of Fort Hare, South Africa

"A revolutionary and audacious book that is likely to cause a paradigmatic shift in our notion of God, determinism, freedom, being and relationality."

-Samuel T. Segun, Research Fellow, School for Data Science and Computational Thinking & The Department of Philosophy, Stellenbosch University, South Africa

It is not far-fetched to say that much of what is termed "African metaphysics" remains a traditional affair, without the sort of critical analysis that sheds away the burden of myths and ethnocentric rigidity. African ideas about the nature of being, God, causality, death, etc., have largely remained the same and unchallenged, mainly due to the hesitancy of someAfrican scholars to question these suppositions or build beyond them. In this book, Aribiah David Attoe presents a unified African metaphysics that first interrogates important notions held by many traditional African thinkers, and then builds upon them to propose a largely materialistic account of African metaphysics. The book re-imagines and reconstructs the idea of God, being, causality and death in African metaphysics, tackling some of the problems associated with these concepts in African thought. It also opens up new vistas of thought, while engaging and encouraging African metaphysicians to explore a previously ignored perspective.