Messay Kebede

Messay Kebede is an Ethiopian philosopher, political thinker, and author. He is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the University of Dayton (Ohio, USA) and formerly taught philosophy at Addis Ababa University, where he also served as Chair of the Department of Philosophy. His scholarship focuses on African philosophy, Ethiopian political thought, modernization, development theory, decolonization, and the philosophy of Henri Bergson. He is the author of several influential books, including Meaning and Development (1994), Survival and Modernization: Ethiopia's Enigmatic Present (1999), Africa's Quest for a Philosophy of Decolonization (2004), Radicalism and Cultural Dislocation in Ethiopia, 1960–1974 (2008), and Ideology and Elite Conflicts (2011). Quotes "None of the Ethiopian intellectuals took up ‘renovating Ethiopian traditional values’ and as a result ‘modernization became Westernization’." PhD Dissertation Oct 2021, Pg 39 "‘The Ethiopian system went in the opposite direction by concentrating all executive, legislative, and judicial powers in the monarch’. Following this, the Ethiopian nobility withdrew entirely from modernization and was stripped of all its roles. Hence, its only role was remaining an absentee landlord while the newly educated took up governing and administrating the country under the auspices of the emperor. This led to the realities of contemporary Ethiopia, namely, the ‘absence of a credible and responsible elite’ built on the traditions of Ethiopia." PhD Dissertation Oct 2021, Pg 40 "The student revolutionaries of the 1970s were repeating the same error the first intellectuals made: they considered Ethiopia ‘as a society which must be destroyed and built anew’." PhD Dissertation Oct 2021, Pg 40 "The earlier Ethiopians used zämänawinnät to denote western civilization and ‘they meant something that time brings and something that is transient. In so saying, they implied that they were not backward; rather, they were temporarily pushed back by a civilization that time brought’." PhD Dissertation Oct 2021, Pg 41 "The introduction of western education was problematic as it declared that ‘other countries can become civilized only when they follow Europeans as their example’. The cyclical understanding of time and history was replaced by one that suggested that time was linear, leading to European civilization as the endgoal." PhD Dissertation Oct 2021, Pg 41 "The students were driven into an ideological radicalism that wished to make Ethiopia the chosen land of Marxism-Leninism, much like their forefathers had made Ethiopia the chosen land of Christianity." PhD Dissertation Oct 2021, Pg 43 "Modernization in Ethiopian appears to be a movement that was conceptualized ‘in terms of conflict between tradition and modernity, not in terms of modernity going in for the revival and enhancement of tradition’. PhD Dissertation Oct 2021, Pg 45 External links Messey Profile Category:Living people Category:Philosophers Category:Writers Category:Political scientists Category:Authors Category:Scholars Category:Academics