An Essay on African Philosophical Thought: The Akan Conceptual Scheme

A study by a Ghanaian philosopher of the ideas of the Akan people of Ghana, treated with the methods of analytic philosophy. Gyekye first defends the claim that traditional African thought contains real philosophy, and argues that it can be recovered from proverbs, language and the reflections of individual sages, not only from collective worldviews. He then examines Akan concepts in turn. On God, he sets out the attributes of Onyame and the arguments implicit in Akan sayings. His best-known chapters analyse the Akan idea of a person as made up of okra, the soul given by God, sunsum, the spirit or personality, and honam, the body; against Kwasi Wiredu, he argues that sunsum is spiritual rather than quasi-physical, making the Akan view a form of dualism. Further chapters discuss destiny and free will, the problem of evil, causality, an ethics grounded in human welfare rather than religion, and the relation between the individual and the community.

It is a model of how to do careful, argued philosophy from an African tradition, and its account of the person and of community is still central to African philosophy courses.