African Philosophy

Welcome to the Division of African Philosophy, part of the School of Philosophy and of the School of African Studies.

Division motto

 * "I entreat any wise and inquisitive man who may come after I am dead to add his thoughts to mine. Behold, I have begun an inquiry such as has not been attempted before. You can complete what I have begun."
 * Zera Yacob

(The idea of cooperative learning and research, in the year of 1667 in Ethiopia!)

Please feel free to contribute (and to copyedit).

Division description
The scope of this division is twofold:


 * to learn about the history of philosophy in Africa and African philosophers.
 * to learn about contemporary African philosophy.

Among other things, insights gained here should be used to improve the Wikipedia articles on theses subjects, some of which are currently (at the date of the foundation of this Division) in a bad condition.

Additionally, teaching materials could be developed on different aspects of African philosophy.

In order to achive it's goals, the first project in this division is to compile an annotaded bibliography of all relevant publications. You are invited to contribute to this.

Active participants
If you would like to contribute to this, please add a reference to your user page here.
 * User:Nannus
 * User:seqoyah bey
 * User:Bhritchie

An Annotated Bibliography of African Philosophy
The bibliography is structured as a list of publications, ordered by author and title. Each entry should contain a link to another page that contains a description of the publication. In this way, the hypertext medium we are dealing with can be used to advantage. Pages can be crosslinked, e.g. to indicate who sites whom etc., and pages can be grouped into different overlapping categories. This biography can then form the basis for more research.

The document description pages should be in Topic namespace. However, it is proposed that Wikiversity creates a special ResourceDescriptor-Namespace, since this method might be advantagous for many projects. As long as you are dealing with only a handful of publications, you can simply list them, but in many cases, the number of publications relevant might be large and Wikiversity should provide a structure for this. We could then have a library consisting of descriptor pages that can be grouped into as many (potentially overlapping) categories as nedessary. In this way, the bibliography started here can be regarded a pilot project for Wikiversity (maybe we need a cross-language Wikilibrary).

Description pages should include: bibliographical data, links to Wikipedia pages about the authors, Lists of main topics (with links to Wikipedia or Wikiversity), an abstract (as unbiased as possible), lists of referenced works (optionally indicating if the author agrees with the cited source or not etc.), reviews (clearly marked as opinion and signed), and information about where to find the work (URLs, URLs of places where the work can be bought, URLs and/or adresses of libraries (or links to Institution/Library descriptor pages). Also, information on where the reference has been taken from should be included. If the author of the descriptor page did not read the work himself but gained Information about its content from another source this should be indicated (such descriptions are better then nothing so they are welcome as long as no other information is available). Incomplete information is better than nothing, so feel free to start with a stub.

Topic:African philosophy/Annotated bibliography

Division news

 * February 17th, 2007 - Division founded!

Ethiopian Philosophy
List of pages relevant to Ethiopian philosophy

Modern African Philosophy
List of pages relevant to modern African philosophy

In-Tray
This section contains links found on the internet that seem relevant but have not yet been evaluated. Please evaluate them, go through them to find relevant literature references or, if they are articles themselves, create a page for them in the Annotated bibliography. Once the referenced sites have been fully evaluated, they should be moved to the external links section (if they have yielded anything of interest).

If you find something on the web you think could be useful here just post it here. Please put only stuff you think is relevant to African philosophy. If somebody has put nonsense here, please remove it.


 * African Philosophy Resources
 * African Philosophy Page of African Studies Centre, Leiden, The Netherlands
 * Review of Claude Summer's book
 * Contains Reference to Claude Summer's book
 * Spezielle Metaphysik in der Untersuchung des Zara Jacob
 * On Zera Yacob
 * Overview, including hints on Egyptian and Ethiopian texts
 * Understanding Non-Western Philosophy: Introductory Readings
 * Page for a course in World Philosophy
 * The Philosophical Text in the African Oral Tradition, by Heinz Kimmerle
 * Beginning of an article by Gail M. Presbey
 * contains some Information on Zera Yacob
 * [http://www.isp.ucl.ac.be/recherche/philafr/A.html Bibliography on African Philosophy and related topics from Université Catolique de Louvain (Belgium)
 * A Blog devoted to Ethiopian philosophy
 * An introduction to Ethiopian philosophy with annotated bibliography and textual selections

Resources and Links
This sections lists relevant resources, e.g. University Department Homepages, Wikipedia articles and Categories etc.