Abstract

If philosophy’s pretensions are to the universal, its creative context is ineluctably local, and we routinely refer, without perceiving any contradiction, to ancient Greek metaphysics, medieval logic, German idealism, the Scottish Enlightenment, American neo-pragmatism, and so forth, without thinking that these modifiers of time and space invalidate the insights of the bodies of thought in question. Recently, race has explicitly emerged—some would say it has long been implicitly present—as another spatiotemporal modifying term, genealogically linked to the modern period insofar as critical race theorists claim race is a constructed product of modernity, and global in scope, insofar as there is a planetary “white” European diaspora of voluntary migration and a “black” African diaspora of forced migration. Africana Philosophy has thus recently been added to the APA’s list of officially recognized philosophical subdivisions, signifying the “black” philosophy that has come out of the African, African-American, and Afro-Caribbean experience. The first two fields are well established; the last has been completely unrecognized. It is the great and overwhelming merit of Paget Henry’s book, Caliban’s Reason: Introducing Afro-Caribbean Philosophy, that it sets out to change that unhappy state of affairs, and succeeds. Moreover, as one of the first works in Routledge’s Africana Thought book series, co-edited by Henry and Lewis Gordon, it should be of great interest not just to the small number of people who presently work in the field, but to philosophers in general who want to educate themselves about how differently philosophy—and what are deemed to be the pressing philosophical questions—will be conceived of in a context so radically different from the more familiar “white” European and Euro-American setting. Yet we do well to remember that these are not at all two unrelated worlds, but rather two poles of a single world.