Good intentions do not guarantee good philosophical outcomes
Evidence
In outlining all this, my intention is not to malign the person of Tempels. I have no doubt that he was a good man – as good as any Belgian missionary could be at that time. Tempels could have personally had good intentions, but good intentions do not always result in good philosophical outcomes. My evaluation of Tempels is in keeping with what his work has come to represent to those who treat it as a philosophical text. — Frans Dokman, Beyond Bantu Philosophy_…, 433
Categorization
Category: Factual Claims
- APHORISMS: A compact bit of practical wisdom about judging ideas by their effects rather than their authors’ intent.
Related
- Tempels wrote for colonial practitioners, not academic philosophers (similarity 0.85)
- Tempels’s book targeted colonial practitioners despite his anticolonial aims (similarity 0.85)
- Tempels’s Bantu Philosophy aimed at more effective Christianization of the Bantu. (similarity 0.84)
- Bantu Philosophy remains a pivotal reference for African philosophy despite its flaws (similarity 0.84)
- Tempels’s book targeted missionaries, magistrates, and administrators, not philosophers. (similarity 0.84)
- Tempels’s evangelization aim made him a philosopher of religion. (similarity 0.84)
- Tempels’s thought is best understood through his whole corpus, not just Bantu Philosophy (similarity 0.84)
- Tempels’s Bantu Philosophy challenged colonial paternalism toward African intellectual capabilities. (similarity 0.83)
- Tempels’ Bantu Philosophy was written as evangelization strategy responding to Luba resistance (similarity 0.83)
- Tempels denied Bantu consciousness of their own philosophy (similarity 0.83)
- Tempels helped initiate the debate over whether African philosophy exists (similarity 0.83)
- Tempels sought to understand Bantu thought only after missionary conversion failed (similarity 0.83)
- Tempels’ Bantu Philosophy remains seminal to African philosophy despite its missionary origins (similarity 0.83)
- Tempels framed Bantu Philosophy as a hypothesis, not a settled doctrine. (similarity 0.82)
- The repeated critiques of Tempels obstruct more useful philosophical developments. (similarity 0.82)