Abstract

The intellectual climate of post-colonial Africa picked up a trail of interesting debates characterized by the quest for identity. In the second half of the twentieth century, for instance, arguments for and against the ‘Africanity’ of the philosophical culture of ancient Egypt occupied a considerable portion of the scholarly landscape of African philosophy. An average researcher into the literature produced by African philosophers in this period would wonder why the inclusion or exclusion of ancient Egyptian intellectual culture as ‘African’ would be a contested issue, given that the word ‘Africa’ is taken to mean a continent in the same way Europe, Asia, and America is understood. Conversely, there are few contenders regarding the criteria of classifying Greek philosophy, German philosophy or even British philosophy as ‘European’. Nowadays, paradigmatic shifts of contemporary schools and systems of African philosophy turn to other scientific questions such as sources, subject matter, formal objects, approaches and methodology of African philosophy. In this chapter, I argue that this shift away from questions of identity to systematic issues in African philosophy is in the right direction given that these contemporary shifts offer a much more robust representation of the key questions and specific philosophical approaches which can be legitimately described as African.