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.
Gyekye staked out the moderate middle. Against Hountondji, he defended rebuilding philosophy from traditional Akan concepts of personhood, God, and cause, but did it with analytic rigor, denying that traditional thought is mere anonymous consensus. Individual critical thinkers, he argued, always existed inside oral cultures, so ethnophilosophy's raw material could become real philosophy if handled carefully. A rescue of the tradition from both its worshippers and its despisers.
Its legacy. It remains a standard defense of a rigorous, tradition-based African philosophy.
- Author
- Kwame Gyekye
- First published
- 1987
- Genre
- Philosophy
- Theme
- African Philosophy and Ideas
Philosophy and an African Culture
Next →The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy, and the Order of Knowledge
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