Arts , Humanities & Social Science

Abstract

This paper offers an attempt at a working conception of African philosophy, one that draws from more than twenty-five years of teaching courses in both African philosophy and American philosophy at several American universities. Indeed, sixty years ago, the battle for and against definitional precision and clarity dominated the debate in African philosophy academic circles. On the one hand, the proponents of the definitional thesis seemed convinced of the superiority of universalism over particularism to the point of subscribing to the need for a transcendent definition of philosophy. From calls for a so-called scientific or technical definition of African philosophy emerged several somewhat absurd and parochial discourses from thinkers who subscribed, perhaps in good faith, to what they deemed to be the scientific and/or analytic nature of philosophy. To these well-meaning scholars, mostly trained at Western universities, philosophy appeared to be synonymous with its modes of production and/or, in some cases, even its modes of transmission. Indeed, for example, while some of them valued the so-called “argumentation and clarification” methods of some Western schools of thought over the universal human need for reflection on the fundamental questions of existence and the worldviews they entailed, others subscribed, instead, to a Kantian conception of philosophy, which they held as containing the necessary and sufficient conditions for distinguishing between philosophical and non-philosophical discourses. On the other hand, those thinkers, who rejected all attempts at definitional precision and clarity, appeared also to succumb to the temptation to count all Africanist projects as philosophical. In this paper, we emphasize the need for a progressive definition, which may be able to avoid the excesses of precision and clarity and, at the same time, recognize the complexity and diversity of the African philosophies without indulging in the need for inclusion at all costs.