African Philosophy and Ideas
Is there an African philosophy, and if so, is it the shared worldview of a people or the argued reasoning of named individuals? These eight books wage that quarrel -- ethnophilosophy against its professional-philosophy critics -- over what counts as thought.
Bantu Philosophy
Placide Tempels
A Belgian missionary claims to have found the buried metaphysics of an entire people.
Read why it mattered →African Religions and Philosophy
John S. Mbiti
Where the European self says "I think," this one says "we are."
Read why it mattered →African Philosophy: Myth and Reality
Paulin J. Hountondji
He coined the word the whole field would then spend decades trying to escape.
Read why it mattered →Philosophy and an African Culture
Kwasi Wiredu
Thinking in a colonizer's language, he warned, can smuggle in a foreign metaphysics.
Read why it mattered →An Essay on African Philosophical Thought: The Akan Conceptual Scheme
Kwame Gyekye
Even an oral culture, he insisted, has its private skeptics and lone reasoners.
Read why it mattered →The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy, and the Order of Knowledge
V.Y. Mudimbe
"Africa" itself, he argued, is a category built by the people who conquered it.
Read why it mattered →Sage Philosophy: Indigenous Thinkers and Modern Debate on African Philosophy
Henry Odera Oruka
He went to the villages with a tape recorder to find the philosophers others said could not exist.
Read why it mattered →In My Father's House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture
Kwame Anthony Appiah
There is no single African essence to recover, he argued, because race was never real.
Read why it mattered →More from the library