"The historico-cultural challenge of Paulin Hountondji’s 'scientism' in the human-computer era"

John Lamola (University of Fort Hare), Niels Weidtmann (University Tübingen)

-Tuesday, December 15th

Dr. M. John Lamola, Associate Professor, Institute for Intelligent Systems, University of Johannesburg: "The historico-cultural challenge of Paulin Hountondji’s 'scientism' in the human-computer era"

(http://ufh.ac.za/faculties/social-sciences/departments/philosophy/staff/john-lamola)

Malesela John Lamola is a Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Pretoria where he researches and teaches on African Social Philosophy and the Philosophy of Technology. In addition, he holds Senior Research Associate appointment at the Institute of Intelligent Systems of the University of Johannesburg.  He obtained his PhD degree from Edinburgh University and an MBA degree from Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University. His research interests are in Political Philosophy in the context of the emergence of African Modernity, and on the intersection between technology and an Africanist social theory and practice. He publishes on Marxian epistemology, applications of Sartrean existential anti-colonial philosophy to contemporary African socio-ontological inquiries, and on the representation of Africans in the technologies of the fourth industrial revolution. Dr Lamola is a professional member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers’ (IEEE) Society on Social Implications of Technology, an active member of the Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective, the South African Center of Phenomenology, and is the founder the Research Group on Africa, Philosophy and Digital Technologies (APDiT).

ABSTRACT

The name of Hountondji is coterminous with his critique of a trend in African Philosophy which he characterised as something that is less than a philosophy, an ethno-philosophy. My project excavates that there is much that has been overlooked or underplayed in studies of his critique of this traditional collective thought system. I alert that at the core of his intervention is a nuanced conception of science that is derived from his education in the philosophies of Edmund Husserl and Louis Althusser, a devotion to which detoured into a detection of ethno-philosophy. Hountondji has endured accusations of imposing a Eurocentric scientism onto an African emancipatory discourse. In this lecture, I advance this dispute around his adamant fidelity to the epistemological primacy of scientificity into the contemporary scenario in which the emergence of the technologies of the so-called Fourth Industrial Revolution have brought the veneration of technoscience and its effects on human society under normative scrutiny. Upon explicating Hountondji’s conceptualisation of science from the vantage points of the post-ethnophilosophy debate, as well as that of the philosophy of technology, I invite an exploration of the challenge his advocacy for the scientificity of philosophy and all African Knowledge poses in a Zeitgeist of concerns with incipient computerisation of human life and asymmetrical relations in the global production of scientific knowledge. I will defend my conclusion that, in an obverse fashion, the crux of Hountondji’s oeuvre equips philosophers globally, and African thinkers in particular, with a mental disposition and an epistemological system for the robust interrogation of our current digitalising social milieu.

Los Angeles 10:00 AM

Sao Paulo 14:00 PM

Germany 7:00 PM

India 10:30 AM