Selected Research
Published
(2022). "Conceptual Analysis and African Philosophy", Philosophical Papers.
In this work, I argue against one tendency among African philosophers to reject conceptual analysis as a methodology for African philosophy on account of it being a tool of analytic philosophy. For many African philosophers, African philosophy should not be associated with anything analytic philosophical. My argument turns on showing how conceptual analysis will in fact benefit African philosophy.
(2021). "Imagination, Metaphysical Modality, and Modal Psychology", in Amy Kind and Christopher Badura (eds.), Epistemic Uses of Imagination. Routledge.
In this work, I pursue a naturalistic (psychological) account of how it is that we use imagination to reach metaphysical modal judgments. I argue that the architecture of imagination provides one way to give this sort of psychological account.
(2021). "Naturalized Modal Epistemology and Quasi-Realism", South African Journal of Philosophy.
One of my primary research goals is to show that traditional modal epistemological problems can be addressed with the aid of cognitive and other empirically scientific findings. For instance, in my (2021), I took on one such problem, namely, the problem of whether/how imagination provides access to metaphysical modality. If this is to work, then it must be the case that Simon Blackburn's challenge to psychologizing imaginative account of absolute modality doesn't work. That's my task in this work.
In Progress
"On the Place of Imagination in the Architecture of the Mind"
Working through the nuances of my (2021), I discovered that even though philosophers have put the architecture of imagination to much use, it has been taken for granted that there is such an architecture in the first place. But alas, that isn't uncontroversial: there is a view that denies that imagination has an architecture, and I am not talking about those who eliminate imagination as a distinct mental attitude. In this work, I aim to show that unless the available neuroscientific evidence about the interdependence of perception and language which aphantasia brings to fore is wrong, imagination must have an architecture.
"Supposition is not an Evolutionary Spandrel"
I continue from where I stopped above here. There, my goal was to argue for the view that imagination has an architecture as against the view that it doesn't, using independent arguments. What the latter says, in effect, is that imagination is rather a by-product of pre-existing capacities, an evolutionary spandrel, to be use familiar jargon. Since my arguments then were independent, I didn't address the reason given for why imagination is a spandrel. Here, I address this reason, with a focus on proposition imagination/supposition.
"On the Relevance of Philosophy Courses in Africa"
I theorize, based on my own experiences in teaching philosophy in South African universities and my educational background in Nigerian universities, that teaching philosophy in Africa is uniquely difficult. I identify the phenomenon of "Black Tax" as the reason for this uniqueness. I then argue that by grounding peer instruction, a pedagogical tool, in the socio-cultural realities of African students, the unique difficulty of teaching philosophy in African can be addressed. Or so I aim to show in this work.