Paulin Hountondji, Knowledge as Science, and the Sovereignty of African Intellection

Abstract

ABSTRACT The practice of the construction and articulation of knowledge according to principles that allow for universal comprehension and progressive appraisal has established itself as one of the self-distinguishing features of ‘the Sciences’. An insistence on adherence to this methodological practice in the Humanities has been dubbed scientism. This article highlights how at the fulcrum of the intellectual mission of Paulin Jidenu Hountondji has been a concern for the equipment of the practices of knowledge production and transmission in Africa with scientific rigor that could render knowledge about Africa into an efficacious instrument for existential, epistemic and political self-authentication. Against the prevalent trend that has reductively cast Hountondji as an African philosopher whose name is singularly coterminous with a critique of African Philosophy as being an ethno-philosophy, I demonstrate that at the core of his intellectual praxis is an emancipatory quest for the instrumentalization of all academic knowledge in Africa – and not only philosophy – into an epistemically sovereign scientia on the ever-changing Africa. His ardent fidelity to the philosophies of Edmund Husserl and Louis Althusser and the consequences of his utilization of their scientificity motif in the formulation of his philopraxis is here elucidated and critically assessed.