African Philosophy Incipit

Incipits indicate an arbitrary genesis or point of departure in a history of philosophy. They represent a conception of the discipline that can be retheorized from the contextual configuration that accounts for it as a valid intellectual system or as an alternative representation of what it is. Neither the amplification of an orthodox perspective nor its deviance can be exempt from the ideology which explains and regulates them as bodies of knowledge constructed at a given time within a regional social formation.

The absence of Africa in European histories of philosophy signifies two theses. The first concerns a relation that is often supposed to be caused between a human space as a referent and an explicit discourse conceptualizing human experiences according to an abstract analytical grid. The second thesis posits conversely the incipit as an entry to a system whose formal values and identity reflects itself as actualizing the singularity of the idea of philosophy. It follows that...