Paulin Jidenu Hountondji, an influential African thinker, died earlier this month.
Paulin Hountondji was recognized for his work in African philosophy, and particularly on the subject of what African philosophy is and needs to be.
He rejected a conception of African philosophy as inward-facing ethnophilosophy in addition to the romanticization of people widsom, and emphasised the significance of universalism, logic, and argument. Souleymane Bachir Diagne (Columbia) puts his view this way:
A folks don’t philosophise. Philosophical reflection is the enterprise of a topic who takes duty for the assertions she or he makes and the arguments used to defend them.
He’s the writer of, amongst different works, African Philosophy: Myth and Reality and The Struggle for Meaning: Reflections on Philosophy, Culture and Democracy in Africa. You’ll be able to be taught extra about Hountondji’s work here.
Hountondji was the director of the African Centre for Superior Research in Porto-Novo, Benin. He had lengthy been a professor of philosophy on the Université Nationale du Bénin in Cotonou, and likewise had held appointments in France, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and the USA (on the College of Louisville). He earned his doctorate on the École Normale Supérieure in Paris.
Along with his educational work, Hountondji served as Minister of Training and Minister for Tradition and Communications within the Authorities of Benin within the early Nineteen Nineties.
He died on February 2nd, 2024.
