Lewis Gordon Quotes on Knowledge
Lewis Gordon's Existentia Africana (2000), Disciplinary Decadence (2006), and Freedom, Justice, and Decolonization (2021) develop the most sustained contemporary work in Africana phenomenology and the philosophy of race. The principal thesis is that the modern disciplines of knowledge — philosophy among them — were constituted in part through the systematic exclusion of Africana philosophical contributions from the canon they have transmitted, and that the philosophical work of decolonization requires not merely the addition of African and African-diasporic figures to existing curricula but the rethinking of the disciplinary architecture that produced the exclusion in the first place. The framework engages closely with Fanon, Du Bois, Sylvia Wynter, and the broader phenomenological and existentialist traditions Gordon takes up from a Black diasporic standpoint.
Quotes
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Attributed to Lewis Gordon:
“Disciplinary decadence is the elevation of method over the search for truth.”
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Attributed to Lewis Gordon:
“To philosophize from below is to philosophize from where the world denies one is allowed to begin.”
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Attributed to Lewis Gordon:
“Reason is not white; reason is the property of every being who claims it.”
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“Four-point-two kilometres is a long way for a frozen body to sink.”
p 1, describing his North Pole swim (2007) -
“p 1, describing his North Pole swim (2007)”
Four-point-two kilometres is a long way for a frozen body to sink. -
“p 9, reflecting on his father's near-drowning off the Australian coast”
My love for the water would always be tempered by respect for dangers that must never be underestimated. -
“p 21, describing his father”
Always when we walked, it was clear to me how much he loved nature, wild flowers, animals in their natural habitat and the simple pleasures of a beautiful sunset. My love for the environment did not develop out of a vacuum.