African Philosophy: Myth and Reality
Paulin J. Hountondji
He coined the word the whole field would then spend decades trying to escape.
The sharpest attack on ethnophilosophy, and the book that made the word a reproach. Hountondji argued that describing a people's collective worldview is not philosophy; real philosophy is a critical, written activity produced by named individuals who argue with one another. He accused Tempels and Mbiti of projecting a false "unanimism" onto Africa for European readers. His demand for individual, scientific reasoning set the terms his rivals had to answer.
Its legacy. "Ethnophilosophy" has been a fighting word in the field ever since.
- Author
- Paulin J. Hountondji
- First published
- 1976
- Genre
- Philosophy
- Theme
- African Philosophy and Ideas
More from African Philosophy and Ideas
- Bantu Philosophy — Placide Tempels
A Belgian missionary claims to have found the buried metaphysics of an entire people.
- African Religions and Philosophy — John S. Mbiti
Where the European self says "I think," this one says "we are."
- Philosophy and an African Culture — Kwasi Wiredu
Thinking in a colonizer's language, he warned, can smuggle in a foreign metaphysics.
- 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.