by Ada Agada F'16. Now available from Paragon House.

Existence and Consolation offers a new stage in original African philosophy that transcends the vestiges of both European colonialism and African ethnocentrism. Consolation philosophy is the culmination of loose developments in African thought that stretch back to ancient Egypt. It reconstructs and reinvents African thought in the wake of the modernism and deconstruction that left African philosophy fractured and reaches a relatively complete synthesis. In Agada’s philosophy of mood, metaphysics combines with morality and rationality is combined with emotionality, creating wholeness with universal appeal.

Agada shows how human experience can be interpreted in terms of a “metaphysics of terror” (arising out of a tragic sense of life) and a “morality of consolation” that overcomes anxiety. The author develops his position in a detailed dialogue with a wide range of African philosophers as well as key figures such as Aristotle, Spinoza, Hegel, Unamuno, and Heidegger.

Winner of Choice Magazine’s Outstanding Academic Title Award for 2015!