Abstract
Following up on the later developments of Paulin Hountondji’s work, this chapter attends to the concept of endogenous knowledge as a key to doing science and philosophy at African universities. Endogenous knowledge as a self-reflexive praxis of re-appropriating marginalised local knowledge can partly be regarded as a response to Hountondji’s critics as well as a consistent development within his own work. To fully understand the turn to endogenous knowledge, the chapter first draws on Hountondji’s concept of science and philosophy as a rigorously critical endeavour derived from his studies of the history of philosophy. In what follows, we present his quest for more scientific autonomy and especially focus on his critique of extraversion as the forced tendency of African researchers to satisfy the theoretical and methodological demands of the former metropoles. Finally, the chapter discusses the particular features of endogenous knowledge as a response to scientific dependency.
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- 1.
When reading the word “science ,” consider the different scope of the content which it has in Anglophone and Francophone definitions. Kwame Appiah points to the difference that, in the English tradition, science is restricted to the physical and natural sciences, while the French meaning, often expressed in plural, encompasses a broader range of “systematic knowledge” (SfM, Foreword, pp. xix–xv). Since Hountondji was raised in the French tradition, the Anglophone reader must add philosophy and humanities as further sciences.
- 2.
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels formulated the starting proposition of what later was termed the sociology of knowledge: The human consciousness is related to its social (class) position. Base/substructure became the central disputed concepts to capture the properties of this relationship. Today, the relationship between base and superstructure and hence between the human consciousness and its social position is understood as dialectical rather than mechanistic (Berger and Luckmann 1967). Althusser and with him Hountondji refer to this dialectical understanding and distance themselves from the deterministic relationship.
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Dübgen, F., Skupien, S. (2019). Path-Clearing: Philosophy and History, Scientific Dependency, and Hountondji’s Turn to Endogenous Knowledge. In: Paulin Hountondji. Global Political Thinkers. Palgrave Pivot, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-01995-2_4
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