Kwasi Wiredu

Kwasi Wiredu was a Ghanaian philosopher, born in 1931 and died in 2022, widely regarded as one of the most important African philosophers of his generation for his sustained work in African philosophy in critical dialogue with the Western analytic tradition in which he was also trained. He is best known for his project of the conceptual decolonization of African thought, arguing that African philosophers should examine inherited concepts, including those absorbed from colonial languages and education, and rework them using resources drawn from indigenous African languages and thought, most fully illustrated through his own analysis of concepts of personhood, truth and morality in the Akan language of his native Ghana. Wiredu was also a sharp critic of ethnophilosophy, the practice of presenting unreflective communal folk belief as though it were systematic philosophy, insisting instead that African philosophy be pursued with the same rigor and critical argument as any other philosophical tradition.