African Religions and Philosophy
John S. Mbiti
Where the European self says "I think," this one says "we are."
Mbiti systematized Africa's religious worldviews into a collective philosophy, famous for the maxim "I am because we are, and since we are, therefore I am," and for a two-dimensional sense of time with a long past but little future. Critics like Hountondji filed it under ethnophilosophy: an anonymous, shared worldview rather than argued individual reasoning. Defenders welcomed a systematic account of African thought on its own terms.
Its legacy. Its thesis about "African time" drew decades of criticism and correction.
- Author
- John S. Mbiti
- First published
- 1969
- Genre
- Religion & 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 Philosophy: Myth and Reality — Paulin J. Hountondji
He coined the word the whole field would then spend decades trying to escape.
- 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.