Philosophy and an African Culture
Kwasi Wiredu
Thinking in a colonizer's language, he warned, can smuggle in a foreign metaphysics.
Wiredu joined the case against ethnophilosophy but pushed past it, calling for "conceptual decolonization": clearing African thought of distortions inherited from colonial languages and from uncritical folk belief. Traditional Akan ideas, he insisted, must be argued with, not merely catalogued, and genuine philosophy must be separated from communal folk thought. Philosophy is a critical activity, he held, not a museum of inherited wisdom.
Its legacy. "Conceptual decolonization" became a rallying phrase for later African philosophers.
- Author
- Kwasi Wiredu
- First published
- 1980
- Genre
- Philosophy
- Theme
- African Philosophy and Ideas
African Philosophy: Myth and Reality
Next →An Essay on African Philosophical Thought: The Akan Conceptual Scheme
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