FLASH: JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY, RELIGION & PEACE STUDIES

In the attempt to disclaim the ideology of the western scholars that Africans have no philosophy, many thinkers in Africa towed the way paved by the Bantu philosophy of Placid Tempels to provide what they considered as African philosophy. This necessitated the coining and bringing of the concept Ethnophilosophy into the African philosophic context. It was a terminology that dates back to Kwame Nkrumah but popularized by Paulin Hountondji. Thus, the concept ‘Ethnophilosophy’ is one of the trends or dimensions identified in African philosophy by one of the leading African philosophers – Odera Oruka. In his idea of ethnophilosophy, culture represents those enterprises that deal with the collective world view of a particular people (Africa). Hountondji in his philosophical enterprise could not accept the works of the earlier postulators of an Africa philosophy. He had series of critics on their work. Finally, he summed the whole work to be ethnophilosophy because, they represent the collective world view of a particular people against what philosophy posits in the actual sense. Hountondji went further to critique ethnophilosophy of lack of a method, non-African orientation and unable to be in a written form, being a collective world view and of non-scientific orientation that are the five main ways he registered his discontent.

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