Philosophy and an African Culture

A collection of essays by the Ghanaian philosopher Kwasi Wiredu, published by Cambridge University Press, asking what philosophy can give to African culture and what it can take from it. Wiredu rejects the habit of presenting traditional folk beliefs as 'African philosophy', and argues that fair comparison sets African folk thought beside Western folk thought, not beside Western science. He criticises features of traditional and modern African life he regards as anachronistic, including authoritarianism and reliance on the supernatural, and calls for a critical, analytic approach that tests both inherited ideas and imported Western assumptions against African languages, especially Akan. Other essays discuss morality and religion, Marxism and ideology, and Wiredu's own controversial theory of truth as opinion, which ties truth to the considered viewpoint of an inquirer.

It lays the foundations of Wiredu's programme of 'conceptual decolonisation' in African philosophy, and a model of how to take a tradition seriously without romanticising it.