THE ‘MANY FACES’ OF PHILOSOPHY: THINKING BEYOND THE ANALYTIC ATTEMPT TO WESTERNIZE AFRICAN PHILOSOPHY

Abstract

In this study, the phrase ‘many faces’ is deployed as the foil to show that the analytic quest to universalize African philosophy is a celebration of the superiority of the Western philosophical culture. The Universalist belief, for Gyekye (2004: 24), has greatly influenced the contemporary professional African philosophers to adopt the analytic method, and also, for the “several ethnological and anthropological excavations of Africa’s cultural beingness” (Afóláyán, 2018: 312). Despite an obvious limitation of the analytic method that it is one among many methodologies to how philosophy can be conducted, it is not entirely logical to argue that African philosophy be westernized because Levy Bruhl calls it ethnophilosophical or anthropological (Kaphagawani, 1998, p. 86). Another reason is that the genuine sincerity of the exponents of the analytic method is in serious doubt, since it is possible that they may be promoting a “racist project” (Biakolo, 1998: 1). As this study agrees with Afóláyán, “African philosophy serves as the platform to commence a reconstruction of an African self” (2018: 312); a self which colonialism relegated, which neo-colonialism extricates, a self which is “the soul of the postcolonial quest for a distinct African philosophy” (Oyedola, 2015: 20), and a self which must not be subjected to eventual recolonialisation (Oyedola, 2024, p. 45).