ABSTRACT
The dominant view amongst contemporary Western philosophers about the essence of a natural object is that one must understand it in terms of only its intrinsic properties. The approach salient in the African philosophical tradition, in contrast, is that, in order to understand a thing’s nature, one must appeal to its relational properties. The Afro-relational approach is underdeveloped, with the primary aim of this chapter being to help rectify that weakness. Specifically, this chapter’s aims are: to articulate an African approach to understanding the essence of a concrete, natural thing in terms of its relationships; to illustrate the Afro-relational approach with the examples of the self and of water; to contrast the Afro-relational characterization of the essence of the self and of water with a typically Western construal in terms of their intrinsic properties; and finally to provide an initial defence of the Afro-relational approach, both by responding to some objections facing it and by providing some new, positive reasons to take it seriously.
