169 NOTES Preface 1. Published in France in 1988, L’inhuman: Causeries sur le temps discusses the need to question the ideological mechanisms through which humans become individuals, that is, acquire a “second” nature that makes them fit into the established social and cultural institutions. According to Lyotard, there is an original inhuman condition—a pure form of the inhuman—upon which patterns of socialization can inscribe dehumanizing practices (especially those carried by hegemonic and totalizing ideologies). 2. In “Resisting Westernity and Refusing Development,” published in 2009: 67–76, Asante declares that “there can be no privileged discourses that protect the status quo where the status quo is anti-human.” 3. These concepts will be defined ahead in chapter 1, “Context and Theory.” Chapter 1. Context and Theory 1. In a Derridean sense it permits a peeling of the layers of colonial assumptions and misinterpretations of the African aesth-ethics. 170 Notes 2. Weltanschauung (worldview/worldsense/ideology/perspective ). The use of the German word is preferential here because it entails the cognitive philosophical dimension that its English translations do not contain. In cognitive philosophy, a people’s Weltanschauung is the sum total of their common experiences, ranging from their geographical/environmental conditions to economic resources available, sociocultural systems , and linguistic families. It emerges as the representation of the way in which a people perceives and conceives the world and is organized around an ontological dimension or model of the world, a cosmological one or explanation of the world, ethical values and moral behaviors, a methodology for action, an epistemology or theory of knowledge, and the etiology of its origins and construction. 3. Acronym for White Anglo-Saxon Protestant, which in the American sociological and political arena has come to denote the general white powerful elite, synonymous with privilege, the “Establishment,” and a conservative ideology. 4. The word “catholic” actually means universal or whole as derived from the Latin word catholicus. 5. Official denomination since 1417, forty years after the establishment of the papal court in Rome by an Italian pope, Urban IV. Chapter 2. Reason and Analysis 1. After Afrocentricity: The Theory of Social Change, first published in 1980, three other key works expanding the theory have been published by the creator of Afrocentricity: The Afrocentric Idea in 1987; Kemet, Afrocentricity and Knowledge in 1990; and An Afrocentric Manifesto in 2007. 2. Without denying that one of the most distinguishing features of human beings is their ability to reason, the rationality Asante is crying out for is one that confronts the positivist assumption of individualistic progress and proclaims a humanist project of society endowed with the democratic values of equality, liberty, and respect. [34.201.122.150] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 12:29 GMT) Notes 171 3. These were influences borrowed from a dynamic German school of philosophers and social science theorists such as Émile Durkheim and Max Weber while studying in the University of Berlin under the orientation of Gustav von Schmoller, Adolph Wagner, and Heinrich von Treitschke during 1892–94. 4. The title of J. M. Blaut’s critique on Eurocentric historiography published in 1993. 5. The term is used here not in the modern political sense of the word but in its original meaning as a philosopher’s theoretical production or philosophical thought. 6. Richard Bernstein, “Philosophy in the Conversation of Mankind ,” Review of Metaphysics 32, 4 (1980): 762; Susan Bordo, “The Cartesian Masculinization of Thought,” Signs 11, 3 (Spring 1986): 439–456. 7. See Meditations I: Concerning Those Things That Can Be Called into Doubt; Meditations II: Concerning the Nature of the Human Mind: That It Is Better Known Than the Body; and Meditation VI: Concerning the Existence of Material Things, and the Real Distinction between Mind and Body. 8. In Critique of Practical Reason Kant deals with the moral problem according to the principles of transcendental criticism ; and in the Critique of Judgment he examines the aesthetic question and the objective and ethical value of human knowledge. 9. Hegel’s philosophical thought is condensed in his three most representative works: Phenomenology of Spirit (1807); The Science of Logic (1812–1816); and Encyclopedia of Philosophical Sciences (1817). 10. Hegel’s transcriptions used in this section can be found in Emmanuel Eze’s Race and the Enlightenment, published in 1997, 122–142. 11. This is the central idea in Blaut’s works The Colonizer’s Model of the World: Geographical Diffusionism and Eurocentric History (1993) and Eight Eurocentric Historians (2000). 12. Observation of the Afrocentric conceptual...