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Chapter 10. Is there one Science, Western Science?
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297 10 Is there one Science, Western Science?* Theophilus Okere Over thirty years ago, while I was writing my doctoral thesis at the Catholic University of Leuven, a thesis incidentally titled, ‘Can there be an African Philosophy? A Hermeneutical inquiry into the conditions of its possibility,’ I was concurrently taking lessons in social and cultural anthropology. That course helped to shape the first part of my thesis which was a study of African culture, the Igbo culture, and was written under the supervision of Professor E. Roosens. The second and more specifically philosophical part of the work explored how the application of hermeneutics or the radical interpretation of culture was actually what philosophers did. This gave me the clue to a possible way of the creation of philosophies or the doing of philosophy in Africa or elsewhere: interpreting rather than merely giving ethnographic narrating. My guides for this part of my work were Jean Ladrière and Paul Ricoeur and my conclusions can be summarised this way: philosophy is nothing more than first, the assumption and then the questioning and critical interpretation of one’s culture at the level of ultimacy and finality and of being. Or, put in a different way, it is trying to find answers to the deep questions of meaning and existence posed by and within one’s environing culture. And if some people can do it for and from their culture as did Plato and Aristotle for Greek culture or Augustine and Aquinas for mediaeval Christianity or Kant and Hegel for Enlightenment Europe, so should others be able to do the same for African or other cultures. It is clear that all philosophy * Paper presented, in February 2004, at K.U.Leuven at the Interdisciplinary Debates on Development and Cultures (http://www.cades.be/debates/index.php) 298 The Postcolonial Turn is local and even individual before it can be universal; and nothing can be genuinely universally valid unless it was first authentically personal and inserted within a given culture. If this is the case for philosophy, it is likely to be the case for human knowledge, since every form of human knowledge must be situated or generated from within a culture or bounded by presuppositions, prejudgments, interests etc. (Habermas 1971). This is the frame of mind that I bring to bear on the question before us: whether there is only one science and whether this is Western science. Explanation of Terms Science To begin with, we shall need to define some of our major concepts, in order to clarify the ambiguities involved in their usage and perhaps, more convincingly present our answer to the double question. Let us take a look at the two operative words: science and Western. These are ambiguous and emotionally charged words invoking intense feelings of partisanship and, for some, even resentment. The etymology of the word ‘science’ takes us to the Latin scientia. Scientia has been rendered into the next generation of European languages as knowledge, savoir and Wissen. Even without these terms having precisely one univocal use, even with their dictionary meanings bristling with nuances and synonyms and with a limitless ability for metaphor that makes their connotation all the more elastic and elusive, we can still say in general what scientia or knowledge is: a special activity or mode of being of man by which man relates to reality from the perspective of the truth, truth here meaning somehow getting at reality as it is. But ‘science’ has acquired a history and is no longer an innocent dictionary word generally and vaguely translating the Latin scientia. It surely retains this primary meaning coinciding with the activity of the human mind in relation to reality whereby its natural curiosity for the truth is satisfied. When Aristotle, in the first book of the Metaphysics wrote that ‘all men by nature desire to know’, he was using the term ‘know’ in the general, commonsensical understanding of the term, common to the people of his day and culture, to people of our day and apparently to all human beings. This knowledge or science includes [54.159.186.146] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 02:10 GMT) 299 Chapter 10: Is there one science, Western Science? acquaintance with, getting into the deep and true meaning of, having familiarity with and getting the real truth about something. But science has also often been restricted to the building of bodies or systems of truth about specified regions of reality, following certain well defined methods...