African Environmental Ethics

Abstract

This chapter explores the metaphysical foundations of classical African environmental ethics, highlighting the logic of this metaphysics, developing a speculative description of the reflective processes through which it was constructed, examining its capacity for adaptation beyond its temporal and cultural origins and the possibility of its internalization by individuals, facilitating commitment to the holistic environmental culture it represents. The chaper is consummated by an account suggesting the practical experience of such an adaptive process. The dialogical form is used in order to simulate and encourage the reflective processes the chapter foregrounds. The discussion between two interlocutors suggests the dialectical method through which knowledge is developed by the individual in dialogue with themselves or by a person in discourse with others, either through direct contact or through the medium of texts.