FLASH: JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY, RELIGION & PEACE STUDIES

Paulin Hountondji is a philosopher from Benin who has, over the last several decades, proposed and then developed a philosophy that has attempted to place centrally the lives and experiences of people residing in the continent of Africa. Indeed, Hountondji’s philosophy is inherently political in terms of it being intimately connected to the affairs and well-being of people from his own and neighbouring countries. In this essay we offer the declarative mapping approach as a potential framework for the analysis and understanding of Hountondji’s philosophy. The framework we develop proposes a clear declaration of Hountondji’s scholarship in the form of a formal sentence of ordinary prose. The declarative mapping sentence for Hountondji’s philosophy specifies eleven facets or major components to be present in his work with each of these facets of Hountondji’s thinking having subcomponents or elements. We describe the facets and elements and comment upon how they structure Hountondji’s work as a whole. In this essay we describe how we arrived at the final declarative mapping sentence and how we connected together the important aspects of Hountondji’s philosophy in a way that suggests how these relate to each other. We then embrace the sentence’s structure to demonstrate how the sentence has the potential to elucidate Hountondji’s ideas. In conclusion we state our belief that declarative mapping has the potential to shed light and understanding upon Hountondji’s scholarship. However, it must be remembered that this is a preliminary foray into his work using the declarative mapping approach and future research may use the approach to more critically and deeply engage with Hountondji’s work.

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