Souleymane Bachir Diagne

Souleymane Bachir Diagne is a Professor of Philosophy and Francophone Studies at Columbia University and the Director of the Institute of African Studies. An alumnus of the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, he did both his BA and his PhD at the Sorbonne. His fields of research and teaching include the history of philosophy, the history of logic and mathematics, Islamic philosophy, and African literature and philosophy. He is the author of numerous books: Boole, l’oiseau de nuit en plein jour (Belin, 1989); Islam and Open Society: Fidelity and Movement in the Philosophy of Muhammad Iqbal (Codesria, 2011); African Art as Philosophy: Senghor, Bergson and the Idea of Negritude (Seagull, 2012); The Ink of the Scholars: Reflections on Philosophy in Africa (Codesria, 2016); Open to Reason: Muslim Philosophers in Conversation with the Western Tradition (Columbia UP, 2018); Postcolonial Bergson (Fordham UP, 2019); and In Search of Africa(s): Universalism and Decolonial Thought (Polity, 2020). The original French version of Postcolonial Bergson won the Dagnan-Bouveret Prize given by the French Academy of Moral and Political Sciences for 2011, and in the same year Diagne was awarded the Edouard Glissant Prize for his work. In 2019, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.