New book: On November 20 2023, De Gruyter published the first scholarly translation of the rationality texts by Zara Yaqob (1600-1693) and his student Walda Heywat, The Hatata Inquiries: Two Texts of Seventeenth-Century African Philosophy from Ethiopia about Reason, the Creator, and Our Ethical Responsibilities (link to De Gruyter). The Open Access Preface is by Dag Herbjørnsrud (SGOKI). 120 years after two inquiries (Hatätas), written in the Classical Ethiopic (Ge’ez), […]
Ethiopia
On December 7, 2021 (1-3 pm EST), the global historian of ideas Dag Herbjørnsrud held the first lecture in QBL’s “Decolonizing the History and Future of Knowledge” Series at Howard University (Washington DC, US). The title of the talk is «Redefining the Canon: Science from across the Global South and Philosophy from Ethiopia, Egypt, and the First Nations of the Americas.» The next lectures in the series will be held […]
The Aeon essay «The African Enlightenment« (Dec 2017) by SGOKI founder Dag Herbjørnsrud, is now translated into French and published in the 100th issue (September 2019) of the renowned magazine Books. The article, which covers the African philosophers Zera Yacob (1599-1672) of Ethiopia and Anton Wilhelm Amo (b. ca. 1703-d. after 1753), has received the title «Zara Yaqob, plus fort que Descartes« (excerpts below). Dec 24, 2017 the essay was […]
This summer, Peter Adamson (Univ of Munich, Germany) and Chike Jeffers (Dalhousie Univ, Canada) have made an episode on the Ethiopian philosopher Zera Yacob (1599-1693) and his treatise Inquiry (Hatäta, 1667). This episode on Zera Yacob is part of the Africana philosophy series, which is included in the podcast History of Philosophy without any gaps (HoPwag). At the end of «Further reading», Adamson and Jeffers writes: «Blog post on the Hatata, […]