Enoch Olujide Gbadegesin, Yunusa Kehinde Salami and Kola Abimbola (eds.) Exploring the Ethics of Individualism and Communitarianism. Harvest Day Publications ,2016,365p.

Abstract

A collection of critical essays on Professor Segun Gbadegesin, one of the most preeminent figures in African philosophy, is by no mean an insignificant feat. This is all the more so because the volume has the objective of achieving a multidisciplinary interrogation of Gbadegesin’s philosophical oeuvre. This is a herculean task because Gbadegesin’s philosophical outputs straddles philosophy of culture, bioethics, social and political philosophy, ethics, and African philosophy. With his African Philosophy: Traditional Yorùbá Philosophy and Contemporary African Realities (1991), Professor Gbadegesin effectively brought deep philosophical insights into significant issues in Africa’s postcolonial malaise. The 16-chapter volume has a sufficiently wide array of significant scholars whose different perspectives provide a wide context within which to situate the brilliant scholarship of Segun Gbadegesin. These chapters all attempted to unravel the core of Gbadegesin’s multifaceted philosophical framework. While some confronted some basic elements of his work, like chapter four (human personality), seven (work), and nine (destiny), other chapters took the thematic concerns of, say, communitarianism and ethics as the springboard for further reflections on corruption, nationalism and nation building, citizenship, religion, personhood, leadership, race, justice, gender and the nature of African philosophy. However, with this distribution of chapters, there is a cogent doubt whether the book actually does critical justice to the imperative of critically engagement with Segun Gbadegesin’s philosophical corpus.