We have eastern (Confucius/buddha) & western schools of thought (Plato/Abraham), but what about Africa? In the last... 6,000 years, who has defined the Southern schools? Is Egypt/hermes trismegistus the pinnacle? Who are the writers/teachers?

by Iliketodriveboobs
imjorman

Follow up question: what has contributed to the dominance of eastern and Western in philosophy? Why did ideas struggle to make it out of Africa when ideas from Europe and Asia seemed to move more freely?

Pecuthegreat

There is this book Towards an Igbo Metaphysics by a Local Christian Priest, Emmanuel M. P. Edeh in the later 1900s that tries to create an African philosophy through the religion and religious philosophy of the Odinani (the traditional religion of the Igbo people), so if u are just looking for an African philosophy you can check out the book. An important core idea are "man is the good that is" and its core values are Love, communal peace and avoiding abominations. There is also after God is dibia published in the later 1990s by John Anenechukwu Umeh, that gets more into the actual beliefs and practices of Odinani.

Given the philosophical ideas that were explored in both I would say that Sub Saharan philosophy, unlike in the West and much like the East was interwoven with their religion as happened with Buddhism and Confuciusm, the longer time without in introduction/invention of writing lead to more mythologizing of figures which by the time explored by Western scientist who saw a distinct difference between religion and philosophy ignored these mythologized wise men and women. And I would say finally Sub-Saharan African culture could have made this distinction hard to make with figures such as gassire from gassire's lute being the origin of Malian Grioles or the wise woman that was the origin of the Igbo Afa Ugili/Akpukpala, both being heavily mythologized and the lack of written records making it difficult make the difference.

The lack of writing on Africa makes it hard to follow the development of these ideas or to provide origins and conflicting information on these thinkers as oral history tends to be mostly uniform and focusing more on larger than life figures like warriors not not philosophers and thinkers and when they focus on these thinkers, tend to focus on single significant figures, like if only the figures u mentioned above are what consititited Western and Eastern philosophy. So because of this we can have have Western and Eastern schools of though based of commentary and later works but until recently, while Sub-Saharan Africa had a religious philosophy the later thinkers, dibias etc that would have been responsible for the later commentaries and truly developing as school of thought are not as well preserved as persons even if they had a great impact of the development of the religious philosophy so that they are easily lost and forgotten than in the West or East, from simple actions of not being demeened important enough to be passed on, along with more mundane facts to the next generation by just a single generation and those that survived would find it difficult to survive the eventual disruption of colonization

I think the major reason of this is that the current states of Africa and its current status as a backward land makes it difficult for both locals to access the funds and environment to do research into such matters and even when the research is done, as seen with the examples above would not break out of their home country and sometimes even home tribes to the read by the wider world and the backward status of Africa means the wider world pays little attention and when some like u pays attention, they find it hard to get or even identity the sources.

With Abrahamic religious philosophy, the reason it is a philosophy is its large influence and the reason it is attributed to Abraham is for legendary/mythological reasons and similar things can be said about Plato, Buddha and Confucius on the reason they are considered world philosophies even though later thinkers of their school of thought contradicted or even "threw away" parts of their philosophy, sometimes enough to be considered new schools and I think Sub Saharan religious philosophy, espicially with the work that has been put in by Emmanuel M. P. Edeh, John Anenechukwu Umeh and others deserves the same treatment but doesn't get that for reasons given above and similar to Abraham can have them named after their religion or legendary figures like gassire or Afa Ugili/Akpukpala

The 2 books mentioned are available on Amazon (I think) and the 2 authors mentioned have their other books written online

Twenty_league_boots

There's an important distinction to be made if you're referring to Africa as a whole or specifically to sub-Saharan Africa. Given that there was no written language developed in sub-Saharan Africa, it simply wasn't possible for a comprehensive philosophical tradition to develop in a manner that could be shared or transmitted in any significant way.

Pecuthegreat

This post is pretty old but in the time since my first response I have managed to get my hands on some examples of African philosophy south of the Sahara oldest of which is Zara Yacob, living 1599–1692 and came up with many ideas that would be developed during the Enlightenment by European and these videos touch on them This and These and there is the book series Ethiopian Philosophy by Claude Sumner

On more recent philosophy developed by Africans based on their traditions like with the Igbo one in here and here, among others and this for the Yoruba, there are of course others for other African Traditions, Ethnicities and Nations although most would probably not be accessible to a western audience

For a general introduction to African Philosophy, try this