Kantianism has long been the enemy of African Philosophy. In this paper, I aim to motivate the surprising – possibly even offensive – thesis that Kantianism needs the African aphorism for its completion, and vice versa. The African aphorism is the basic precept of African ethics, that is, “A person is a person through other persons”. I begin by describing my favoured, constructivist reading of this African aphorism, after which I outline the problem Kant faces in his famous derivation of the categorical imperative from the hypothetical imperative. I examine the solutions to this problem previously proposed by Korsgaard and Darwall, and, finding both wanting, go on to explain how I think the African aphorism can do what these others could not. We can, as Kant intended, derive the categorical imperative from the hypothetical imperative – but only with the additional, African premise that a person is a person through other persons.
Jessica Lerm (Fri,) studied this question.