Liam Kofi Bright is a social epistemologist in the LSE's philosophy department. He received his PhD from Carnegie Mellon.
On Lying by St. Augustine
What better way to start off a list on knowledge by the study of, if not its opposite then, certainly something which very much hinders its spread! Really this is just a classic work of philosophy that anyone should read. Clear thinking about a concept which has a lot of significance for both epistemology but also ethics and even just our every day lives, how we relate to one another. Also nice to remind people that the history of philosophy in Africa is no recent thing, that one finds African philosophers among the ancients too.
Typically philosophers think that truth is a prerequisite for knowledge -- I can only know that my breakfast is cold if my breakfast really is cold, which means it is true my breakfast is cold. So to understand knowledge it seems I must understand truth. So what is truth? Pilate famously didn't wait for an answer to that question, but philosophers have been rather more persistent, and down the centuries we have developed many theories. In the linked essay Wiredu argues that one of the most famous and popular theories about truth actually faces real difficulties to even be made intelligible once you translate it into Twi. This paper is a lovely example of how even the oldest debates in philosophy can be rejuvenated and seen anew when a comparative perspective is brought to bear on them.
Personally I am a social epistemologist, which means I study how our social organisations can help or hinder us in gathering and sharing knowledge. The hope in my field is that by understanding this we can change things for the better, rearrange our institutions to make them better serve the end of knowledge seeking. Lauer's paper is a fine example of the sort of thing we are trying to do here, as she argues that the way philosophers ourselves go about deciding what judgements to take seriously and what premises to accept will inevitably perpetuate racist bias even if the practitioners are themselves egalitarians. What is more, she draws on recent work by a former LSE professor, Christian List, to argue for the upshot that institutional change is needed to properly debias philosophy.
The impact of colonialism on modern African philosophy can scarce be understated. Epistemology is no exception, and there are many papers exploring the interaction between the ways of life and institutions imposed by colonising powers and the knowledge gathering systems and behaviours of various African peoples. No list of works of African epistemology could be complete without some representative of the genre, and this paper by Taiwo is my favourite of the field.
I end with this because I just think it is a nice read! Hountondji reflects on the idea of taking responsibility for one's ideas, and how this notion of intellectual responsibility seems to tie ideas to the one who generated them and thus, apparently, to a particular place or community. Hountondji's relationship to such an idea is complicated and I won't try to summarise it, instead I will just say that watching him think through this really helped me better understand what I want to do in taking responsibility for my own intellectual conduct.