Philosopher
Paulin Hountondji
1942–2024
Also known as Paulin J. Hountondji
Beninese philosopher whose critique of "ethnophilosophy" argued that African philosophy must be critical, argued work by individual thinkers, not a reconstruction of a people’s collective worldview.
Paulin Hountondji was born in 1942 and became one of the leading figures of African philosophy. His academic career began in the early 1970s in Zaire. His first book, published in French in 1976 and in English as African Philosophy: Myth and Reality in 1983, provoked a long debate across the continent; in the 1990s he was also closely involved with CODESRIA, the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa.
With Kwasi Wiredu and Peter Bodunrin he is counted among the “professional” or universalist philosophers, who insisted that African philosophy be done with the same critical methods as philosophy anywhere else. Critics answered that this school tore down the ethnophilosophers’ work without building an alternative, and later African philosophers sought ways to combine critical rigour with traditional thought. He died in February 2024.
Key ideas
- Against ethnophilosophy
- Hountondji gave the term ethnophilosophy its notoriety, attacking Placide Tempels’ Bantu Philosophy and its followers. Tempels’ book, he said, was not Bantu philosophy at all but Tempels’ own, dressed in African paraphernalia.
- Philosophy by Africans
- African philosophy is the philosophy that Africans produce, a body of texts and arguments, rather than an unchanging collective outlook ascribed to a people.
- Universal standards
- African philosophy must meet the same standards of critical reflection and argument as philosophy anywhere, with no separate, culture-bound criteria.
- Knowledge beyond myth
- Against the view that Africans had to leap from myth to reach philosophy, he argued that local knowledge systems were already distinct from myth, since no one can live on myths alone and moral principles must be general to apply at all.
- Tradition
- African
- Region
- Benin
- Period
- Critical reconstruction
- Themes
- Knowledge and scepticism
Influences
Where these links come from
- Henry Odera Oruka drew on Paulin Hountondji. Source: Gail M. Presbey, African Sage Philosophy, Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Key works
- African Philosophy: Myth and Reality (Sur la « philosophie africaine » : critique de l’ethnophilosophie), 1976
Terms on this page
- ethnophilosophy
- A critical label, made notorious by Paulin Hountondji, for work such as Placide Tempels’ Bantu Philosophy that presents African philosophy as the shared, unwritten worldview of a whole people.
Sources
- Jonathan O. Chimakonam, History of African Philosophy, Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
- Dismas Masolo, African Sage Philosophy, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
- Paulin J. Hountondji (1942 – 2024): A tribute to a great thinker, CODESRIA
- Sanya Osha, Paulin Hountondji: Tribute to a great modern thinker, University World News