 | This article includes a list of references, related reading, or external links, but its sources remain unclear because it lacks inline citations .(September 2022) |
Bantu Philosophy (La philosophie bantoue in French) is a 1945 book written by Placide Tempels which argues that the Bantu peoples of Sub-Saharan Africa have an implicit philosophy, and attempts to describe its basic tenets.
In his book, Tempels argues that the African philosophical categories can be identified through the categories inherent to language. According to Tempels, the primary metaphysical category in the thought of Bantu-speaking societies is Force. That is, reality is dynamic, and being is force.
Tempels argues that there are three possible views of the relationship between being and force.
He argues that members of Bantu-speaking cultures hold the last view of force. Specifically:
'Force' is not for Bantu a necessary, irreducible attribute of being: no, the notion of 'force' takes for them the place of the notion 'being' in our philosophy. Just as we have, so they a transcendental, elemental, simple concept: with them 'force' and with us 'being'.[ This quote needs a citation ]
Tempels argues that as a result of this fundamental difference in categories, the African life of the mind is structured around understanding and defining Force, which contrasts sharply with the Western enterprise of understanding and defining Being.
Placide Tempels wrote Bantu Philosophy in (Flemish-) Dutch, his original language. The chapters were first published one by one in two different journals Equatoria and Band. This first version was in Dutch.
His friend Émile Possoz, magistrate in Congo, who had also inspired him to write the book, immediately started to translate the chapters in French, the main language in the Belgian colony. When Lovania wanted to publish it as a book, in French, they asked for another translator. For this project Antoine Rubbens, another friend of Tempels was found. His translation is in the 1945 Lovania edition.
Only after this publication the Dutch version came out as a book, in 1946 with publishing house De Sikkel in Antwerp, Belgium. This version contains the words 'original version' on the title page.
When the Parisian publishing house Présence Africaine wanted to republish it, Tempels corrected Rubbens first version extensively, and this became the 1949 edition. A third French translation, which aimed to correct errors in the earlier versions and get closer to the Dutch original, was made by Tempels expert A.J. Smet in 2001, which is published online. See external link below.
In 1956 a German translation by Joseph Peters was published at Wolfgang Rothe Verlag. This contains several articles by German Africanists after the main text. In 1959 Présence Africaine now published an English translation of the book, made by Colin King.
The Présence Africaine translations are the most widely read versions of Bantu Philosophy. There are still others, however. In Angola, two different translations in Portuguese were made, and there also exists an Italian translation, and recently a Spanish translation has been published. All these apparently are made on the basis of the French 1949 edition.
Non-philosophy is a concept popularized by French philosopher François Laruelle.
African philosophy is the philosophical discourse produced in Africa or by indigenous Africans. African philosophers are found in the various academic fields of present philosophy, such as metaphysics, epistemology, moral philosophy, and political philosophy. One particular subject that several modern African philosophers have written about is on the subject of freedom and what it means to be free or to experience wholeness. Philosophy in Africa has a rich and varied history, some of which has been lost over time due to inadequate proper documentation. Some of the world's oldest philosophical texts have been produced in Ancient Egypt (Kemet), written in Hieratic and on papyrus, from ca. 2200 to 1000 BCE, one of the earliest known African philosophers was Ptahhotep, an ancient Egyptian philosopher. In general, the ancient Greeks acknowledged the Egyptian forebearers, and in the fifth century BCE, the philosopher Isocrates declared that earliest Greek thinkers traveled to Egypt to seek knowledge; one of them Pythagoras of Samos who “was first to bring to the Greeks all philosophy.” In the 21st century, new research by Egyptologists has indicated that the word "philosopher" itself seems to stem from Egypt: "the founding Greek word philosophos, lover of wisdom, is itself a borrowing from and translation of the Egyptian concept mer-rekh (mr-rḫ) which literally means “lover of wisdom,” or knowledge." In the early and mid-twentieth century, anti-colonial movements had a tremendous effect on the development of a distinct modern African political philosophy that had resonance on both the continent and in the African diaspora. One well-known example of the economic philosophical works emerging from this period was the African socialist philosophy of Ujamaa propounded in Tanzania and other parts of Southeast Africa. These African political and economic philosophical developments also had a notable impact on the anti-colonial movements of many non-African peoples around the world.
Paulin Jidenu Hountondji is a Beninese philosopher, politician and academic considered one of the most important figures in the history of African philosophy. Since the 1970s he has taught at the Université Nationale du Bénin in Cotonou, where he is Professor of Philosophy. In the early 1990s he briefly served as Minister of Education and Minister for Culture and Communications in the Government of Benin.
Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe was a French philosopher. He was also a literary critic and translator. Lacoue-Labarthe published several influential works with his friend Jean-Luc Nancy.
Jean André Wahl was a French philosopher.
Placide Frans Tempels, OFM was a Belgian Franciscan missionary in the Congo who became famous for his book Bantu Philosophy.
Michel Onfray is a French writer and philosopher with a hedonistic, epicurean and atheist worldview. A highly-prolific author on philosophy, he has written over 100 books. His philosophy is mainly influenced by such thinkers as Nietzsche, Epicurus, the Cynic and Cyrenaic schools, as well as French materialism. He has gained notoriety for writing such works as Traité d'athéologie: Physique de la métaphysique, Politique du rebelle: traité de résistance et d'insoumission, Physiologie de Georges Palante, portrait d'un nietzchéen de gauche, La puissance d'exister and La sculpture de soi for which he won the annual Prix Médicis in 1993.
Afrikan Aleksandrovich Spir (1837–1890) was a Russian neo-Kantian philosopher of German-Greek descent who wrote primarily in German, but also French.
Maurice Blondel was a French philosopher, whose most influential works, notably L'Action, aimed at establishing the correct relationship between autonomous philosophical reasoning and Christian belief.
Principles of Philosophy is a book by René Descartes. In essence, it is a synthesis of the Discourse on Method and Meditations on First Philosophy. It was written in Latin, published in 1644 and dedicated to Elisabeth of Bohemia, with whom Descartes had a long-standing friendship. A French version followed in 1647.
Quentin Meillassoux is a French philosopher. He teaches at the Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne.
Roger-Pol Droit is a French academic and philosopher. An alumnus of the École normale supérieure de Saint-Cloud, he has written numerous books, most notably 101 Experiments in the Philosophy of Everyday Life, which has been translated into 22 languages. For 25 years, he has studied the way the East is seen in Western philosophy.
Jules Vuillemin was a French philosopher, Professor of Philosophy of Knowledge at the prestigious Collège de France, in Paris, from 1962 to 1990, succeeding Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Professor emeritus from 1991 to 2001. He was an Invited Professor at the Institute for Advanced Study, in Princeton, New Jersey (1968).
Jean-Marc Ela was a Cameroonian sociologist and theologian. Working variously as a diocesan priest and a professor, Ela was the author of many books on theology, philosophy, and social sciences in Africa. His most famous work, African Cry has been called the "soundest illustration" of the spirit of liberation theology in sub-Saharan Africa. His works are widely cited as exemplary of sub-Saharan African Christian theology for their focus on contextualisation and their emphasis on community-centered approaches to theology.
Alexis Kagame was a Rwandan philosopher, linguist, historian, poet and Catholic priest. His main contributions were in the fields of ethnohistory and "ethnophilosophy".
François Jullien is a French philosopher, Hellenist, and sinologist.
Michel Weber is a Belgian philosopher. He is best known as an interpreter and advocate of the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead, and has come to prominence as the architect and organizer of an overlapping array of international scholarly societies and publication projects devoted to Whitehead and the global relevance of process philosophy.
Joseph Stephen O’Leary is an Irish Roman Catholic theologian. Born in Cork, 1949, he studied literature and theology at Maynooth College. He also studied at the Gregorian University, Rome (1972-3) and in Paris (1977–79). Ordained for the Diocese of Cork and Ross in 1973, he was a chaplain at University College Cork (1980–81). He taught theology at the University of Notre Dame (1981–82) and Duquesne University (1982–83) before moving to Japan in August, 1983. He worked as a researcher at the Nanzan Institute for Religion and Culture, Nanzan University, Nagoya (1985–86), where he later held the Roche Chair for Interreligious Research (2015–16). He taught in the Faculty of Letters at Sophia University, Tokyo, from 1988 to 2015.
Adriaan Pattin (1914–2005) was a Belgian historian of medieval philosophy. His 1966 edition of the Pseudo-Aristotelian Liber de Causis, although intended to be "provisional", was for decades the best version available to scholars.
Stefano Kaoze was a priest who has been described as "the first Congolese intellectual". He was the first African to be ordained as a Catholic priest in the Belgian Congo in 1917. In the following years, he wrote widely on a range of subjects connected to history, linguistics, ethnography and folklore of the peoples on the western shore of Lake Tanganyika with a particular interest in his own Tabwa ethnic group.