The Problematics of Enlightenment: Human Reason, North African Philosophy, and the Global South

In The Problematics of Enlightenment: Human Reason, North African Philosophy, and the Global South , Mourad Wahba explores the relevance of the philosophy of the Enlightenment to contemporary issues in Egypt and the Global South more generally. Wahba provides a historical account of the reception of Enlightenment philosophical discourse in the Arabic-speaking world through the study of the work of Rifa?a al-Tahtawi, Muhammed Abdu, Farah Antun, Abbas Mahmoud al-?Aqqad, and Louis Awad. Wahba argues that the claim that human reason is the ultimate source of justification-trumping the authority of inherited social institutions and the claims of historical revelation-is a universalizable principle whose actualization would make progress possible in Egypt and elsewhere. This book, translated by Zeyad el Nabolsy, provides Anglophone readers access to a philosophy from the Global South that does not take the alleged Eurocentrism of Enlightenment philosophies as its central problematic. Moreover, Wahba is concerned with situating the problems that emerge in the context of contemporary Arabophone North African philosophy in the larger context of African philosophy, including engagement with the work of Senghor and Nkrumah.

Mourad Wahba is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy, Ain Shams University, Egypt. He is the author of 22 books and Head and Founder of the Afro-Asian Philosophical Association as well as the Averroes International Association and Enlightenment.

Uchenna Okeja was educated in Nigeria and Germany. He has undergraduate and postgraduate degrees in both philosophy and theology. He also received a master degree in management. He was awarded his PhD in philosophy by Goethe University in Frankfurt in 2011. Currently, he teaches courses in philosophy, business ethics and corporate governance at the Goethe University Frankfurt and the University of Applied Sciences in Fulda, Germany. For his PhD dissertation, he was awarded a gifted students' fellowship by the Friedrich-Ebert-Foundation. Though primarily interdisciplinary in his research, he mainly works in the areas of political and social philosophy, epistemology of religious beliefs, postcolonial philosophy and applied (especially business) ethics.

Zeyad el Nabolsy is assistant professor in the Department of Philosophy at York University.

Bruce B. Janz is Professor of Humanities in the Department of Philosophy and co-director of the Center for Humanities and Digital Research at the University of Central Florida, USA.