In the Department of Music at King’s College London, steps have been taken (and continue to be taken) towards the positioning of music as a ‘global humanities discipline’. However, an analogue as a way to point towards the questions this seminar will begin to address: it is slowly being understood that just because certain parties were very much against slavery in historical eras, this did not mean that they actually believed that b/Black people possessed anthropological parity (with them). As such, while there have been a vast range of fulsome (and in many cases sincere) efforts to ‘decolonise’ music curricula, diversifying the ethnoracial and gender (etc) identities of various thinkers on reading lists is in fact much easier than creating conditions for and then succeeding in generating actual epistemic diversity within/across this discipline.

Drawing from a singularly wide range of canons and corpora including political theology, aesthetics, epistemology, anthropology, phenomenology, ethics, HPS (history and philosophy of science) and questioning others (such as cognitive neuroscience of music and neuroaesthetics), this paper is predicated on a set of convictions that were reached before its author/presenter encountered the pioneering work of the Benin-born philosopher Paulin Hountondji whose searing critique of what he characterised as (translated into English) 'ethnophilosophy' remains a minority position – but one fully accepted by this presenter. As such, this paper will offer what its author characterises as a ‘bespoke hermeneutic crunch’ (yes, hermeneutics as well – and, of course, postcolonial theory/ies…) of certain challenges that academic music currently faces before turning to the African-American philosopher (himself also a jazz musician) Lewis Gordon’s argument for philosophical anthropology as an indispensable part of both ‘b/Black’ and ‘Africana’ philosophies (both of which are examples of exactly what Hountondji campaigned against...), using that as a starting point for an approach to philosophical anthropology that eschews over-valorisation towards the German tradition (Cassirer, Scheler, Plessner et al – all also read by Gordon) whilst also being specific to music.

Speaker info:

Alexander Douglas is a Lecturer in Music at King’s College London. Please see Alexander's academic biography here.