What is African philosophy? It is not an intellectual tradition demarcated by a racial or geographic or ethnic identity, as some ethnophilosophers would have it, otherwise it would mean that Anke Graness, Bruce Janz, or Gail Presbey would not count as African philosophers. But nor is it a discipline defined by the possession of a Ph.D. from a philosophy department, as professional phiosophers would have it, otherwise it would mean that Zera Yacob, Okemba Simiyu Chaungo, or Sheikh Abdilahi would not feature in accounts of African philosophy.

What then is African philosophy? Call it an intellectual formation – a complex of practices that are articulated toward the end of imagining, constituting, delimiting, and contesting particular intellectual forms and ensembles; historical and spatial narratives; institutional powers; relational networks; subjectivities and persons; dispositional postures, phenomenologies, and sensibilities; and artifacts, performances, and events.

An intellectual formation seeks to be more explanatorily robust than Michel Foucault’s discursive formation. Though the notion of an intellectual formation is resonant with Foucault’s account of how knowledge is constituted in and through power, it goes beyond Foucault in taking seriously the irreducibly normative quality of particular utterances and texts. That is, rather than taking the effects of power as exhausting the vitality of scholarly inquiry into the constitution of utterances, texts, and subjectivities, the critique of an intellectual formation delves into the political horizons of select philosophical texts; the ethical attunement of particular theoretical interventions; the empirical depth and breadth of certain methodological commitments; the argumentative validity of specific propositional statements; the aesthetic imagination of distinctive performances and events; and on and so on.

But if Foucault’s “discursive formation” isn’t adequate, neither is Alasdair MacIntyre’s concept of practice. Foucault’s discursive formation is, at best, indifferent to, at worst hostile to normativity. MacIntyre’s account of practice, on the other hand, is altogether too invested in an inflationary form of normativity. By practice, MacIntyre means a “coherent and complex form of socially established cooperative human activity through which goods internal to that form of activity are realized in the course of trying to achieve those standards of excellence which are appropriate to, and partially definitive of, that form of activity, with the result that human powers to achieve excellence, and human conceptions of the ends and goods involved, are systematically extended.” MacIntyre’s characterization of practices as “coherent” follows from the Aristotelian-Thomistic metaphysical essentialism that is the cornerstone of his philosophy. For all its invocation of “tradition,” then, it conceives of actually existing history as the manifest sign of a deeper eschatologial logic.