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.
Oruka's answer to the professional-philosophy challenge. He interviewed individual traditional "sages," separating ordinary folk wisdom from "philosophic sagacity": named elders who critically question their own culture's beliefs. This delivered exactly what Hountondji demanded, individual critical reasoners inside oral societies, undoing the claim that African philosophy must be written. He also mapped the field, naming its ethnophilosophical, ideological, professional, and sage currents.
Its legacy. His map of four trends is still a standard way of charting the whole debate.
- Author
- Henry Odera Oruka
- First published
- 1990
- Genre
- Philosophy
- Theme
- African Philosophy and Ideas
The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy, and the Order of Knowledge
Next →In My Father's House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture
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."
- 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.