African Philosophy: The Analytic Approach

African Philosophy: The Analytic Approach sets out to demonstrate that the analytic approach to philosophy, which is prominent in the world today, can both be applied to and derived from Africa’s indigenous cultural heritage. The author achieves this via critiques of the viewpoints of several leading scholars who maintain, for various reasons, that there is insignificant evidence of substantive philosophical thought in the indigenous African cultural context. The text also uses the very same analytic approach, embraced and espoused by most of these critics to deny Africa a place in the philosophical universe, to demonstrate that there is indisputable evidence of original and valuable philosophical enterprise in Africa’s indigenous conceptual systems that is of direct relevance to such canonical core disciplines of philosophy as epistemology, ethics and aesthetics. Here is a rich assortment of methodological and substantive ruminations (to borrow one of the author’s favorite words) on African philosophy by a philosophical researcher who has not been afraid to muddy his hands with fieldwork. The results are engaging and instructive. Beyond that, they challenge some long-held Western preconceptions. Readers are hereby alerted to Hallen’s detailed and patient but surgical critique of Rorty’s theory of the absence of philosophy from all cultures except those of the West. — Kwasi Wiredu