THE ESSENTIALS OF AFRICAN SAGE PHILOSOPHY

Abstract

As an academic discipline, African philosophy was born some six decades ago as a set of reactions to the disparaging attitude toward Africans (and other non-European “natives”) entertained by leading European anthropologists of the first four decades of the 20^th Century. I regard the set of reactions to said disparaging outlook as comprising three types: ethnophilosophy, interlocutor-based systematizations, and sage philosophy. I will discuss them in this order because sage philosophy arose as an attempt to remedy what its advocates saw as shortcomings of the first two types of reactions.