Background
Hountondji, Paulin J. was born in 1942 in Abidjan, Ivory Coast.
Hountondji, Paulin J. was born in 1942 in Abidjan, Ivory Coast.
High school in Dahomey, Baccalaureate (1960), Lycée Henri IV, Paris. Ecole Normale Supérieure, Rue d’Ulm, Agrégé in Philosophy, 1966. Third cycle Doctorate on Husserl, 1970.
Assistant in Philosophy, University of Besançon, 1967-1970. Chargé de cours. University of Lovainium, Kinshasa, 1970-1971. Professor of Philosophy, National University of Zaire, Lubumbashi, 1971-1974.
Chargé d’enseignement, Faculté des Lettres, University of Cotonou,
Benin, 1974-1990. Minister of National Education and Culture, 1993-1993. General Secretary of the Inter-African Council of Philosophy, 1974.
A disciple of Louis Althusser in his conception of philosophy—which is always a history of philosophy—Hountondji is regarded as the principle critic of the ethnophilosophical trend created by Tempels and Kagame according to which there is in all sociocultural contexts a latent but organized philosophy expecting a translation. His main position is that philosophy should be distinguished from Weltanschauungen. In this sense he is very close to Franz Crahay, yet critical of his five conditions for the promotion of African philosophy. For Hountondji, the notion of a conceptual take-off makes sense as a general condition of existence of an African philosophy He thinks that in all civilizations a conceptual take-off is always already accomplished even when human actors use or integrate mythical sequences into their discourse. By virtue of this characteristic, one could compare Parmenides s discourse to those of Confucius, Plato, HegelNietzsche or Kagame. On the other hand, he insists that, whether mythical or ideologicallanguage evolves in a social environment, developing its own history and the possibility of its own philosophy.