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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 February 2024
Hegel is the great denier of the meeting and dialogue between civilizations and, contrary to every idea of hybridization as the very spirit of culture, he carefully undertook a thorough ethnic cleansing of history: from the Greek beginning to the European ending the circle is continuous even when it went through other spiritual universes. They could scarcely have the breadth to confront the movement of Reason carried along by the idea of its goal. So it mattered little to the making of its history that philosophy spoke Syriac then Arabic.
1. Alain de Libera, La Philosophie médiévale, Paris, PUF, 1993, p. 53.
2. Ibid., p. 54.
3. Ibid.
4. Here might I be allowed to refer readers to my own study of the controversy entitled ‘Grammaire, logique et vérité’, in Entre les Grâces et les Muses. Eléments historiques de culture générale, edited by D. Dauvois, C. Simon and J. Hoarau, Paris, Ellipses, 1994.
The topicality of this issue will be noted; it would be taken up first in Alexis Kagamé’s project to dig up the ontology carried by the Kinya-rwandan language by identifying its ‘categories’ following the model of Aristotle's categories (Alexis Kagamé, La Philosophie bantu-rwandaise de l’être, Brussels, Académie Royale des Sciences Coloniales, 1956); second, in Benveniste's article on ‘categories of language and categories of thought’, reprinted as Chapter VI in his Problèmes de linguistique générale, Paris, Gallimard, 1966.
5. This is part of the title of the doctoral thesis he presented in Cambridge in 1907, which was translated into French by Eva de Vitray Meyerovitch with the title: La Métaphysique en perse, Paris, Sindbad, 1980.
6. On Muhammad Iqbal's thought, see Souleymane Bachir Diagne, Islam et société ouverte. La fidélité et le mouvement dans la pensée de Muhammad Iqbal, Paris, Maisonneuve et Larose, 2001.
7. Ousmane Kane, Dakar, Codesria, 2003.
8. See J. O. Hunwick and S. R O'Fahey (eds), Arabic Literature of Africa, Leiden/New York, E. J. Brill, 1994.
9. In no. 184 of Diogène (1998): Afrique, regards croisés, regards pluriels, the editors asked authors to summarize their text in their language: Yoruba, Wolof, Ebonics, Twi, Somali, Dhuluo, Akan, Beti.
