Souleymane Bachir Diagne on Open to Reason: Muslim Philosophers in Conversation with the Western Tradition

Conversations in Atlantic Theory

This is Fatima Seck and you’re listening to Conversations in Atlantic Theory, a podcast dedicated to books and ideas generated from and about the Atlantic world. In collaboration with the Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy, these conversations explore the cultural, political, and philosophical traditions of the Atlantic world, ranging from European critical theory to the black Atlantic to sites of indigenous resistance and self-articulation, as well as the complex geography of thinking between traditions, inside traditions, and from positions of insurgency, critique, and counternarrative.

Today’s discussion is with Souleymane Bachir Diagne, who teaches in the Departments of Philosophy and French at Columbia University. He is the author of a number of books on the history of logic, comparative philosophy, and the legacy of life philosophy in the francophone African tradition. In this conversation, we discuss his new book Open to Reason: Muslim Philosophers in Conversation with the Western Tradition, which examines the place of reason and rationality in the Islamic philosophical practices in Western Africa from the medieval period forward.