This paper’s central task is to demonstrate how the African concept of personhood provides a suitable grounding for an authentic African philosophy of education. An authentic African philosophy of education is one in which there is a constant search for underlying principles for reflecting on the foundation, nature, and justification for the need and desirability of education in Africa. Scholars have drawn diverse implications from the African concept of personhood, especially in the areas of normative ethics, social and political, and legal philosophies. However, sufficient attention has not yet been paid to how the African conception of personhood could drive fruitful theoretical engagements with the foundations, nature, and justification of the African philosophy of education. This paper attempts to fill this gap. With the combination of critical literature review and philosophical methods of conceptual and logical analyses (and argumentation), the paper argues for the centrality of an African concept of personhood to the questions of the foundation, form (nature), and justification of an authentic African philosophy of education. The paper concludes that a personhood-based African philosophy of education provides a plausible framework within which these questions can be fruitfully engaged.

The problem of the nature of mind has lingered for a long time. Generated by the question of whether the mind is an independently existing entity or merely an aspect of bodily events and processes, the problem of the nature of mind has divided Western philosophers into two opposing camps, namely dualism and physicalism. Contemporary discourse of the nature of minds, within the Western philosophical tradition, continues to privilege physicalism over dualism, because it avoids the theoretical impasse engendered by the dualist inability to account for how two radically different entities manage to interact with each other. Although physicalism avoids the dualist pitfalls, it, however, encounters the problem of plausibly accounting for the possibility of conscious experience without commitment to the dualist ontology of a realm different from the body. In this article, we provide an African (Yoruba) perspective to the question of the nature of mind as an alternative to the Western perspective represented by dualist and physicalist theories. We develop a variant of dualism called “contextual dualism,” which accepts the dualist basic tenet of the duality of body and mind but diverges from it by permitting that some physical organs of the body also function in the capacity of the mind. Using ethnological analysis and the Yoruba linguistic hermeneutics as theoretical frameworks, the paper argues that the difference between when a physical organ functions as body and when it functions as mind is revealed in Yoruba language through their contexts of use. The paper concludes that contextual dualism drives a reconciliatory wedge between mainstream dualism and physicalism.

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