Crahay distinguished lived worldviews from proper reflective philosophy

Evidence

The Belgian philosopher Franz Crahay provided the first proper philosophical critique of Tempels. Using a metaphor from aeronautic vocabulary, conceptual taking-off(décollage conceptuel), he asserts that Tempels and his disciples have not made a distinction between a “vision of the world” and philosophy proper. At best, what Tempels and his disciples have provided can be regarded as a meta-theory on the Bantu worldview (Crahay, 1965, pp. 64–65). Crahay judges that Tempels’s use of philosophical terminology is vague on specific notions, such as metaphysics, ontology, and psychology. He sees an additional weakness in the title of Tempels’s book because it intellectually confuses the vulgar meaning of philosophy as lived (vécu) with its strict, reflective (réflexif) meaning. Crahay conceives of philosophy as an explicit, analytical discourse, radically critical and autocritical and systematic. He thinks philosophy as intellectual practice has to be different from uncritical descriptions of the worldviews, traditions, wisdom, and languages of a people. — Frans Dokman, Beyond Bantu Philosophy_…, 539

Categorization

• DEFINE: Clarifies Crahay’s technical distinction between philosophy as vécu (lived) versus réfléxif (reflective) — the core of the ethnophilosophy critique.