Bantu Philosophy
Placide Tempels
A Belgian missionary claims to have found the buried metaphysics of an entire people.
The founding text of ethnophilosophy. Tempels argued that the Bantu share an implicit metaphysics built on "vital force," in which all being is dynamic power. It opened the long debate over whether a collective, unwritten worldview counts as philosophy. It stays contested because its author was a Belgian colonial missionary attributing one philosophy to a whole people, partly to make them easier to convert.
Its legacy. Nearly every African philosopher who followed defined a stance partly by reacting to it.
- Author
- Placide Tempels
- First published
- 1945
- Genre
- Philosophy
- Theme
- African Philosophy and Ideas
More from African Philosophy and Ideas
- 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.
- 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.