Ubuntu and the Struggle for Reason: Humaneness Beyond Humanism // Puget Sound Undergraduate Philosophy Conference

On 12/2/2022, I received the following call for submissions from Gina Gould, the undergraduate philosophy advisor:

Puget Sound Undergraduate Philosophy Conference Call for Papers

Having been involved in organizing the Tech Policy Lab's WeRobot conference the previous summer, I was intrigued about the possibility of attending a philosophy conference and decided to apply. The problem, however, was that I had scarcely any philosophy papers to submit besides my previously published essay on African philosophy, since I had only taken one writing-based philosophy class at this point.

As I was pondering whether to submit my published essay, revise and submit it, or submit something else altogether, I reached out to Dr. Colin Marshall, a philosophy professor at UW. I chose to reach out to Dr. Marshall in part because he had recently edited a book about comparative approaches to metaethics, so I thought he might know something about African philosophy. He advised me that it was fine, if perhaps a bit less common, to submit a revised version of a previously published paper to the conference, and to narrow down the scope of my essay to something a bit smaller than a critique of the entirety of Western humanism.

Taking his advice, I began to refine my paper by incorporating narrower analytic critiques of rationalism, rather than the structural critiques of humanism I had used before. I also had to go back through the essay and re-insert citations due to an interesting quirk of Gadfly (the philosophy magazine I published my first essay in), which explicitly requested contributors not to include citations because it was a magazine rather than an academic journal. In the process, I also found myself also refining the language and argument structure of my essay to hone my argument for a more academic audience. All in all, although the paper I ended up submitted borrowed significantly from my first one, I still learned a lot in the process and feel that it stands on its own as a more professional artifact than my first essay on African philosophy.

Presentation at the Puget Sound Undergraduate Philosophy Conference

At the conference, I gave a presentation about my paper to an audience of undegraduate students and faculty. I fielded a lot of great questions and received valuable feedback from my peer reviewers. One of the main pieces of feedback I received was that it was unclear how applicable an African philosophical framework could be to American society. The impact of the conference did not end with the conference itself, however. I am incredibly grateful to Dr. Sara Protasi, a philosophy professor at the University of Puget Sound, who put me in contact with Dr. Chike Jeffers, a philosophy professor at Dalhousie University. I then had a short conversation that summer with Dr. Jeffers, who provided further feedback on my paper and introduced me to more nuanced debates within African philosophy like Kwame Gyekye's critique of strong communitarianism. These comments indirectly inspired the next iteration of this project, a new research paper on African conceptiosn of personhood.