Paulin J. Hountondji is one of the most important and controversial figures in contemporary African philosophy. His critique of ethnophilosophy as a colonial, exoticising and racialized undertaking provoked contentious debates among African intellectuals on the proper methods and scope of philosophy and science in an African and global context since the 1970s. His radical pledge for scientific autonomy from the global system of knowledge production made him turn to endogenous forms of practising science in academia. The horizon of his philosophy (...) is the quest for critical universality from a historical, and situated perspective. Finally, his call for a notion of culture that is antithetical to political movements focused on a single identitarian doctrine or exclusionary norms shows how timely his political thought remains to this day. This book gives a comprehensive overview of Hountondji’s philosophical arguments and provides detailed information on the historical and political background of his intellectual oeuvre. It situates Hountondji in the dialogue with his African colleagues and explores links to current debates in philosophy, cultural studies, postcolonialism and the social sciences. (shrink)

Scientific collaboration between Northern and Southern researchers and development programs for research capacity-building have received new attention of practitioners and scholars during the last decades. This essay review takes four recent publications on North-South research cooperation and development politics as a starting point to ask for possible links between macro-, meso-, and micro-levels of social analysis that has found renewed interest in the sociology of science literature. The approach has the advantage to heuristically systematize the anthropological, sociological and policy-driven approaches (...) chosen by the editors and authors of the books under review. Moreover, the focus on links between the three levels adds to the conceptual interaction of sociology of science and the science policy fields to estimate the effects of science governance in international and especially in asymmetrical relations with different access to resources. (shrink)