FLASH: JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY, RELIGION & PEACE STUDIES

In this article, we converse with Paulin Hountondji's work titled African Philosophy: Myth and Reality, published in African System of Thought, edited by Charles S. Bird and Ivan Karp, Indiana University Press. We articulate the major contributions of the author to African philosophy and critically engage with his ideas in order to open new vistas of thought. Our duty as conversationalists is, first, to articulate his idea of African philosophy as myth, which includes (i) cultural philosophy, (ii) primitive unanimity and collective philosophy, and (iii) Ethnophilosophy; second, to examine his idea of African philosophy as reality, which includes a thorough assessment of (i) the content and (ii) the criterion of African philosophy. We then evaluate the strengths and limitations of Hountondji's position against the wider literature before concluding that what Hountondji calls myth in African philosophy in fact forms the foundational background of African philosophy.

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