Hume and Kant supplied the racial judgments Tempels opposed.

Evidence

Tempels was an extraordinary thinker, philosopher, theologian, missionary and Franciscan. The Dutch anthropologist, Johannes Fabian (1969: 170), characterized him and his work as follows: … It will be remembered that Tempels started out as a revolutionary of sorts. What he did in Bantu Philosophy was to challenge dominant ideas about the intellectual capabilities of Africans, and, consequently, the methods of colonial administration and Christian mission, based on these dominant ideas. At this stage, he appears to us as a man who broke out of the sort of colonialism that has been aptly characterized as paternalism. — Frans Dokman, Beyond Bantu Philosophy_…, 69 (#contradicts, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Kaoze and Tempels both rejected the image of a savage Africa.; Kant differed from Hume by holding African mental limits to be environmental; Canonical African philosophy emerged largely in response to Tempels’s provocation — Frans Dokman, Beyond Bantu Philosophy_…, 346 (+3 more)

Related

• Kaoze and Tempels both rejected the image of a savage Africa. (similarity 0.94)
• Tempels’s Bantu Philosophy challenged colonial assumptions that Africans could not think logically. (similarity 0.92)
• Tempels remained indebted to European thinkers like Hegel and Levy-Bruhl despite his goals (similarity 0.89)
• Tempels broke with colonial paternalism to defend African rational capacity (similarity 0.89)
• Tempels helped initiate the debate over whether African philosophy exists (similarity 0.89)
• Tempels’s work ended Enlightenment claims that Africans lack reason, while subtle prejudice persists (similarity 0.88)
• Tempels’s book targeted colonial practitioners despite his anticolonial aims (similarity 0.87)
• Tempels’s Bantu Philosophy challenged colonial paternalism toward African intellectual capabilities. (similarity 0.87)
• Tempels first raised whether an African ontology exists (similarity 0.87)
• Tempels urged missionaries to abandon European methodologies for African dialogue. (similarity 0.87)
• Tempels aimed to systematize Bantu ontology using Western philosophical categories. (similarity 0.87)
• Tempels’s egalitarian claims earned rejection from both colonizers and Africans (similarity 0.86)
• Canonical African philosophy emerged largely in response to Tempels’s provocation (similarity 0.86)
• Tempels wrote Bantu Philosophy for practitioners, not professional philosophers (similarity 0.86)
• Colonial caricature of Africa shaped both Tempels and Oruka as intellectual revolt (similarity 0.86)

Broader Connections

• Kant differed from Hume by holding African mental limits to be environmental #corroborates (0.70)
• Tempels’s work ended Enlightenment claims that Africans lack reason, while subtle prejudice persists #expands (0.65)
• Tempels’s Bantu Philosophy challenged colonial assumptions that Africans could not think logically. #contradicts (0.50) — Frans Dokman, Beyond Bantu Philosophy_…, 69
• Canonical African philosophy emerged largely in response to Tempels’s provocation #complicates (0.40) — Frans Dokman, Beyond Bantu Philosophy_…, 346
• Tempels helped initiate the debate over whether African philosophy exists #corroborates (0.35) — Frans Dokman, Beyond Bantu Philosophy_…, 208