An Ethos of Transdisciplinarity

Toyin Falola’s astounding intellectual production must be one of the mysteries in the intellectual world. It has transcended the confined world of historical research into broader horizons that include the role of the public intellectual. The present study would undertake a rigorous analysis of the origins, continuities and discontinuities of this transformation. This means we have to recast the debates regarding who is a public intellectual from a multiplicity of discursive situations and historical and cultural contexts. We have to employ methodological parallels from North Atlantic intellectual traditions. How did the role of the public intellectual emerge in the first place in world intellectual history? Addressing this question would enrich this research endeavour immensely.
In interrogating comparative discursive formations, we shall re-evaluate the roles, functions and achievements of continental intellectuals such as Betrand Russell, Jean-Paul Sartre, Andre Malraux, Albert Camus, Michel Foucault, Edward Said, Wole Soyinka and Pierre Bourdieu. Again, this discursive element will give this study a global appeal and range.

Sanya Osha is the author of several works of scholarship on philosophy, politics, and cultural anthropology. Since 2002, he has been on the Editorial Board of Quest: An African Journal of Philosophy/Revue Africaine de Philosophie. His books include Kwasi Wiredu and Beyond: The Text, Writing and Thought in Africa (2005), Ken Saro-Wiwa’s Shadow: Politics, Nationalism and the Ogoni Protest Movement (2007), Postethnophilosophy (2011), African Postcolonial Modernity: Informal Subjectivities and the Democratic Consensus (2014), and Ken Saro-Wiwa’s Shadow (Expanded Edition): Politics, Nationalism and the Ogoni Protest Movement (2021). Other major publications include, Truth in Politics (2004), co-edited with J. P Salazar and W. van Binsbergen, and African Feminisms (2006) as editor. He is a fellow of the African Studies Centre, Leiden, the Netherlands, and a research associate of ZMO Berlin, Germany.