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Paulin Hountondji is another major ¤gure in contemporary African philosophy whose in®uence spans the Francophone-Anglophone divide. He is from the Republique du Benin (formerly Dahomey) and for years has been professor of philosophy at the University of Cotonu. Hountondji is best known for his critique, African Philosophy: Myth and Reality (1996), of philosophers in and of Africa who propound what he calls “ethnophilosophy .” His intention is to condemn the intellectual injustice that he believes to be enshrined in publications purporting to be African philosophy when they display the following essential characteristics. Ethnophilosophy presents itself as a philosophy of peoples rather than of individuals. In African societies, therefore, one is given the impression that there can be no equivalent to a Socrates or a Zeno. Ethnophilosophy speaks only of Bantu philosophy, Dogon philosophy, Yoruba philosophy; as such, its scope is collective , tribal, and of the worldview variety. Ethnophilosophy’s sources are in the past, in what is described as authentic traditional African culture of the precolonial variety, of the Africa prior to modernity. These sources are to be found primarily in products of language: parables, proverbs, poetry, songs, myths—oral literature generally. From a methodological point of view, ethnophilosophy tends to portray African beliefs as things that do not change, that are somehow timeless. Disputes between ethnophilosophers arise primarily over how to arrive at a correct rendering of oral literature and traditions. African systems of thought are depicted as placing minimal emphasis upon the rigorous argumentation and criticism that are prerequisites to the sort of search for truth that involves discarding the old and creating the new. Tradition becomes suspect as a justi¤cation that some50 5 Ethnophilosophy and Philosophical Sagacity thing is “true” and is portrayed as antithetical to innovation (Hountondji 1996a). If this material was presented as cultural anthropology or as ethnology, Hountondji would ¤nd it less objectionable. But when it is introduced as philosophy, as African philosophy, a demeaning and subversive double standard is introduced that excuses African thought and philosophy from having critical, re®ective (it becomes, in effect, prere®ective), rational, scienti ¤c, and progressive content produced by individual thinkers in any signi ¤cantly cross-culturally comparative sense. Of the philosophers whose work has been discussed or mentioned in this text, Hountondji would certainly claim that the work of John Mbiti, Placide Tempels, Alexis Kagame,53 and Marcel Griaule (Ogotemmeli) is of an ethnophilosophical character. And he would likely characterize the approach of analytic philosophers who use African languages as a basis for African philosophy54 (since languages are shared and thereby also collective) as also guilty of the ethnophilosophical sin.55 Hountondji does not hold these creators of unphilosophical African philosophies criminally responsible for their crimes. In their own intellectual circles, they believe they are doing something genuinely professional and progressive in their attempts to link Africa and philosophy. Also, Hountondji appreciates the problematic sources of Africa’s modern intellectual history that may be traced back to the colonial period, when academic philosophers—African or expatriate—were a rare species. The principal Western initiatives for serious scholarly studies of African cultures came from ethnography and anthropology. Given the holistic parameters of the social sciences, it is understandable—if still not ideologically or professionally acceptable—that something like ethnophilosophy came about. But that Ethnophilosophy and Philosophical Sagacity 51 53. “Scienti¤c rigour should prevent us from arbitrarily projecting a philosophical discourse on to products of language which expressly offer themselves as something other than philosophy” (Hountondji 1996a, 43). 54. There is anticipation of Quine’s indeterminacy in the following quote from Hountondji, in which he derides the usually unspeci¤ed methods these ethnophilosophers use to educe African philosophy from oral literature: “The discourse of ethnophilosophers, be they European or African, offers us the baf®ing spectacle of an imaginary interpretation with no textual support, of a genuinely ‘free’ interpretation, inebriated and entirely at the mercy of the interpreter, a dizzy and unconscious freedom which takes itself to be translating a text which does not actually exist and which is therefore unaware of its own creativity. By this action the interpreter disquali¤es himself from reaching any truth whatsoever, since truth requires that freedom be limited, that it bow to an order that is not purely imaginary and that it be aware both of this order and of its own margin of creativity” (1996a, 189 n16; his italics). 55. For a postmodernistic defense of ethnophilosophy, see Salemohamed 1983. For a more recent, comparatively strident, condemnation of...

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