Abstract
Approaching African philosophy from the perspective of the Beninese philosopher Paulin Hountondji has the advantage of elucidating the internal debates of what constitutes African philosophy and of transcending these local debates towards a critical universalism. Hountondji’s focus on philosophy as a form of a responsible, individual and rigorous critique offers to keep a distance from homogenising culturalist assumptions that influenced earlier as well as contemporary philosophical debates and political arguments. His rich work invites us to reassess the debate on ethnophilosophy, to re-appropriate marginalised local knowledge, to thereby critically assess global scientific production, to discuss identity politics and cultural relativism, and hence to contribute to a shared horizon of understanding the globally entangled world.
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Dübgen, F., Skupien, S. (2019). Introduction. In: Paulin Hountondji. Global Political Thinkers. Palgrave Pivot, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-01995-2_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-01995-2_1
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