Ethnophilosophy persists as a challenge to Western philosophy’s universalist pretensions

Evidence

This recent debate points to ethnophilosophy’s continuing relevance and the pivotal position it occupies in African philosophy. It also defies Western pretensions and orientations that purport Western philosophy’s mode of knowing and contemporary format is the only method of philosophizing and constitutes an object touchstone by which all other philosophical traditions can be measured and expressed. Instead of fading into the distance, ethnophilosophy has asserted itself as foci of ethnic and regional consciousness and as bearers of a legitimacy which is underpinned by local, but not necessarily limited to, cosmological meanings. In other words, ethnophilosophy challenges the internal epistemological claims as expressions of Eurocentrism and North Atlantic hubris. — Frans Dokman, Beyond Bantu Philosophy_…, 487

Categorization

• XREF: Overlaps with the reader’s prior knowledge of the Frankfurt School’s critique of instrumental/universalist Eurocentric reason, and postcolonial epistemology debates. — connects to: Universalising environmental ethics is ethnocentric, not a mark of human progress — Val Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature, 641; Enlightenment universalism, despite Eurocentrism, respected non-European civilizations