Dr. Paul Irikefe

Personal Information

Paul Irikefe works at the Chair of Practical Philosophy and Ethics beginning February 2026. His research specialisms are in epistemology, (virtue) ethics, African philosophy, and metaphilosophy. Currently, his research centres on applying the notion of skills to understanding the epistemology of philosophy. He also works on a project in African philosophy that seeks to connect ethnophilosophy to the project of decolonization in Africa.

He received his PhD in 2023 at Cardiff University, and held a two-year postdoctoral fellowship at UC Irvine—theUniversity of California’s President and Andrew Mellon Foundation Fellowship. He obtained his research master’s degree from KU Leuven, Belgium.

Specialisms

Area of Specialization

Epistemology

Metaphilosophy

African and Indigenous Philosophy

Virtue ethics

Area of Competence

Philosophy of Language

Political Philosophy

Philosophy of Race

Selected Publications

• Irikefe, P. O. Forthcoming. ‘The Equal Status of Indigenous Knowledge and Scientific Knowledge in the Academic Curriculum: The Case from Metis.’ Australasian Philosophical Review, 1–15.
• Irikefe, P.O. 2025. African Epistemology. In Kurt Sylvan, Matthias Steup, Ernest Sosa and Jonathan Dancy (eds.), The Blackwell Companion to Epistemology, Third Edition, pp.1–14.
• Irikefe, P. O. 2025. ‘The Vice of Nepotism: The Political and the Epistemic.’ Doi: https://doi.org/10.1080/02691728.2025.2516732. Social Epistemology: A Journal of Knowledge, Culture and Policy
• Irikefe, P. O. 2025. ‘The Calibration Challenge to Philosophical Intuitions.’ Synthese: An International Journal for Epistemology and Philosophy of Science. Vol. 205, no.94, 1–24. Doi: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-024-04903-6.