The Vitalist Senghor

Reviewing the few entries for this year, it seems that I've thus far neglected to post a link to my review essay on "The Vitalist Senghor: On Diagne's African Art as Philosophy," published by Comparative and Continental Philosophy in May 2013. It's available here (for subscribers). Here is the abstract:

In this essay, I examine Diagne’s claim that the fundamental intuition of Léopold Sédar Senghor’s thought is this: African art is philosophy. Diagne argues that it is from an experience of African art and an encounter with Bergson’s philosophy that Senghor comes to formulate his philosophical thought, which is better understood as vitalist rather than essentialist. I conclude by arguing that Senghor’s vitalism is a philosophy of becoming which nevertheless lacks an account of radical political change.

And here is a photo of Robespierre obstructing my work: 

Teaching Fundamental Philosophical Questions

I just found out that I will be teaching "Fundamental Philosophical Questions" in the winter semester, along with  my course in the Department of Visual Arts, "Art Theories." Local University of Ottawa lore has it that the philosophy department split what is usually "Introduction to Philosophy" into "Fundamental Questions" and "Great Philosophers" as a concession to the Analytic/Continental divide. I'm using the fundamental questions to add several figures that aren't usually included in the canon (I've done this before with Great Philosophers as well). Here's what I've got after a few hours of work:

This course is an introduction to several of the fundamental questions of philosophy. We will be reading a variety of material dedicated to the search for the ‘good life.’ We will see that what the good life is has its own history, as we analyze texts ranging from Plato’s Republic to Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth. We will see how such a form of life is thought as an idea of harmony, religious devotion, a rational pursuit, a product of self-exploration and self-realization, and finally, as a mode of social involvement that seeks to appropriate and transform a way of life denied to historically marginalized groups and peoples.

After the usual suspects like Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, or Rousseau (culled from Charles Guignon's anthology The Good Life), we'll spend a significant amount of time working with the themes of existentialism and alienation as a way into Léopold Sédar Senghor's "Negritude: A Humanism of the Twentieth Century" and Fanon's "On National Culture." This will be a whole other way to ask what the good life is.