The Struggle for Meaning: Reflections on Philosophy, Culture, and Democracy in Africa

✍ Scribed by Paulin J. Hountondji

• Publisher: Ohio University Press
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 332
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

The Struggle for Meaning is a landmark publication by one of African philosophy's leading figures, Paulin J. Hountondji, best known for his critique of ethnophilosophy in the late 1960s and early 1970s. In this volume, he responds with autobiographical and philosophical reflection to the dialogue and controversy he has provoked. He discusses the ideas, rooted in the work of such thinkers as Husserl and Hountondji's former teachers Derrida, Althusser, and Ricoeur, that helped shape his critique. Applying his philosophical ideas to the critical issues of democracy, culture, and development in Africa today, he addresses three crucial topics: the nexus between scientific extraversion and economic dependence; the nature of endogenous traditions of thought and their relationship with modern science; and the implications--for political pluralism and democracy--of the emergence of "philosophies of subject" in Africa. While the book's immediate concern is with Africa, the densely theoretical nature of its analyses, and its bearing on current postmodern theories of the "other," will make this timely and elegant translation of great interest to many disciplines, especially ethnic, gender, and multicultural studies.

✦ Table of Contents

Foreword
Preface
Acknowledgments
Translator’s Acknowledgments
Part I: Discovering Husserl
1 Landmarks
1. From Porto-Novo to Rue d’Ulm
2. Rationality as a Problem
2 The Idea of Science
1. An African Concern
2. The Scientific Demand
3. Truth and the Good
4. The Interconnection of Truths
5. The Language of Things
6. The Impossible Closure
Part II: Critique of Ethnophilosophy
3 Anger
1. From Husserl to Tempels
2. An Exceptional Crucible: Présence Africaine
3. The Copenhagen Presentation
4. A “Set of Texts”
5. Developments
4 The Issues at Stake
1. Political Anchoring
2. Theoretical Stakes
3. Some Readings
Part III: Positions
5 A Polluted Debate
1. The Elegance of the Elders
2. Muddying the Issues
3. The Nationalist Reaction
4. Marxists and Anti-Marxists
5. Initial Responses
6 Rootedness and Freedom
1. The Time for Rereadings
2. Linguistic Relativity and Philosophy
3. The Particular and the Universal
4. The Field of the Thinkable
7 Reappropriation
2. A Rampant Pragmatism
3. Variation on “Distance”
4. The Impossible De-linking
5. The Appropriation of Knowledge
6. Reappropriation
Afterword
Notes
Bibliography
Index