The eclectic paradigm of African philosophy, monoculturalism and the imperative of language in and for African development
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The objection to the existence of philosophy in Africa goes back at least to David Hume and Lucien Levy-Bruhl who deny African thought systems the status of philosophy. What seems like a first rebuttal to their position, which later metamorphosed into a full debate about on whether or not there is or is not a distinct discourse called African philosophy, was Placide Tempels' Bantu Philosophy (1959). The debate got intense in the early 1970s and continued for nearly two decades. Is African philosophy, in the final analysis, about the source of the material for that philosophy? The eclectic nature of this debate is mainly highlighted by the divergent grids of the Universalists and the Traditionalists. Whereas the former consider African cultural practices and world views as unwelcome in philosophy, the latter endorse African belief systems as philosophical. However, Abiola Irele, in a position that mimics the Eurocentric objection of African thought as philosophical argues essentially that the diverse African languages too lack the vision of development and so are unsuitable for facilitating development. He suggests that the path to development in Africa lies in European culture, i.e., European languages. The main thesis of this paper is that Africa's diverse linguistic resources can be utilized in the African quest for development.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.027 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".