African systems of thought

In this seminal exploration of the nature and future of African philosophy, Paulin J. Hountondji attacks a myth popularized by ethnophilosophers such as Placide Tempels and Alexis Kagame that there is an indigenous, collective African philosophy separate and distinct from the Western philosophical tradition. Hountondji contends that ideological manifestations of this view that stress the uniqueness of the African experience are protonationalist reactions against colonialism conducted, paradoxically, in the terms of colonialist discourse. Hountondji argues that a genuine African philosophy must assimilate and transcend the theoretical heritage of Western philosophy and must reflect a rigorous process of independent scientific inquiry. This edition is updated with a new preface in which Hountondji responds to his critics and clarifies misunderstandings about the book's conceptual framework.

"What is the meaning of Africa and being an African? What is and what is not African philosophy? Is philosophy part of Africanism? These are the kinds of fundamental questions that this book addresses. V.Y. Mudimbe argues that the various discourses themselves establish the worlds of thought in which people conceive their identity. Western anthropology and missionaries have introduced distortions not only for outsiders but also for Africans trying to understand themselves. Mudimbe goes beyond the classic issues of African anthropology or history. He says that the book attempts an archeology of African gnosis as a system of knowledge in which major philosophical questions recently have arisen: first, concerning the form, the content, and the style of Africanizing knowledge; second, concerning the status of traditional systems of thought. He is directly concerned with the processes of transformation of different types of knowledge."--Book cover.