Dr Richmond Kwesi

Dr Richmond Kwesi is a Senior Lecturer and the Head of the Department of Philosophy and Classics in the School of Arts at the University of Ghana. He obtained his PhD in 2017 from the University of Cape Town, South Africa.

His teaching and research stems from a passion to engage in practically-oriented philosophical inquiry into human thought and practices and the ways in which they can promote human well-being and development. With training and expertise in analytic philosophy, he engages in two main strands of research: one, Philosophy of Language and Epistemology, and two, African Philosophical Thought and Practices. His research in philosophy of language is on metaphor, truth and assertion, where he has published papers to show how metaphors can be truth-evaluable within an inferentialist theory.

On African philosophical thought, he researches on African consensual democracy, Kwasi Wiredu’s empiricalism and Kwame Nkrumah’s Consciencism. He is co-editing a volume on Kwame Gyekye’s philosophy and doing a critical commentary on J. B. Danquah’s 1927 Phd thesis in philosophy. His focus on the works of these Ghanaian philosophers (Kwame Nkrumah, J. B. Danquah, Kwasi Wiredu, Kwame Gyekye, William Abraham) are both to provide critical reflections on their ideas and to bring to light their enduring significance on contemporary issues.

His research on African consensual democracy is focused on articulating what he takes to be distinctive and individuating of the traditional African political practice that has been characterized as democracy by consensus, its distinction from populism and deliberative democracy but compatibility with liberal multiparty systems, and the proposed ways in which the African political practice can be universalized as a democracy without borders.