Because of this, philosophers suffer persecution and death, even today. He, too, publicly characterized Nigeria's Sani Abacha military dictatorship as an unjust form of government, based neither on reason nor on truth but rather on a monopoly and application of force and violence. The problem with philosophers is not that they cannot keep quiet or keep their thoughts to themselves. Most of them do. The trouble is that even the quiet ones cannot escape the social consequences of their thinking.
Philosophy is a social practice.
When one raises questions about the human condition of the individual, the question unavoidably implicates social conditions. By studying the lives and writings of African philosophers, Bucknell students absorb information about Africa and explore how and where philosophy may be practiced in America. African philosophy at Bucknell and in America cannot be about Africa alone. In the classroom, we cannot separate the Africans' efforts to understand themselves as individuals and as peoples from their attempts to understand who we are, nor can we separate their attempts to understand us from our attempts to understand ourselves and them. In such a climate of intellectual mutuality and among Bucknell's best philosophy students, already critically rooted in their own histories, what occurs in African Philosophy II is a meeting of Africa and America, an intellectual and multivalent conversation whose precedent is jazz.