Kwame Gyekye

Biography

He was educated at

Philosophical work

Person and community

Gyekye challenges the view that in African thought, community confers personhood on the individual and thus the individual's identity is merely derivative of the community. He attributes this view to African philosopher

Instead, Gyekye argues that African thought ascribes definite value to the individual. He cites an

While Gyekye argues that the individual is ontologically complete, he also acknowledges that people live in community, as in the proverb, "When a person descends from heaven, he/she descends into a human society." In his view, a person's abilities are not sufficient for survival, so that community is necessary for the survival of the individual, as articulated in the proverb, "A person is not a palm tree that he/she should be self-sufficient."

Thus, he argues, it is an error to hold that African philosophy denies the individual, but instead, the individual is an intrinsically valuable child of God, intricately linked into a web of human relationships. He cites a Ghanaian artist who wrote, "we are linked together like a chain; we are linked in life, we are linked in death; persons who share a common blood relation never break away from one another."

Bibliography