Abstract

Samuel Imbo has written a short, concise introduction to some of the major issues addressed over the last century by scholars and activists concerned with African philosophy. The book is divided into five chapters, the first of which surveys answers to the question "What is African philosophy?". Because of a legacy of intellectual denigration that portrays Africans as incapable of abstract thought, this question is often the first raised by those outside the field. This legacy is reinforced by the assumption that philosophy requires a tradition of written communication. Imbo addresses both of these sources of skepticism, delineating three senses of African philosophy: ethnological, universalist, and hermeneutical.