Denying a people a system of thought denies their humanity itself.

Evidence

Anyone who claims that primitive peoples possess no system of thought, excludes them thereby from the category of men. Those who do so, contradict themselves fatally elsewhere … To declare on a priori grounds that primitive peoples have no ideas on the nature of beings, that they have no ontology and that they are completely lacking in logic, is simply to turn one’s back on reality. Every day we are able to note that primitive peoples are by no means just children afflicted with a bizarre imagination. It is as Men that we have learned to know them in their homes. — Frans Dokman, Beyond Bantu Philosophy_…, 690

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the a priori denial of ontology and logic to ‘primitive peoples’ as a self-contradictory exclusion from humanity — core Tempels argument.
• XREF: connects to: Enlightenment mechanism denied man’s historical capacity for development. — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History…, 776; Denying others’ subjectivity reduces the denier to a thing — Christine Daigle, Jacob Golomb (eds.), Beauvoir and Sartre: The Riddle of…, 618