African Philosophy

African philosophy is the philosophical discourse produced using indigenous African thought systems. African philosophers work across the fields of present philosophy, including metaphysics, epistemology, moral philosophy and political philosophy, and they discuss substantive questions from an African perspective. Before the twentieth century it was carried on and passed down mostly by oral means, by thinkers whose names have been lost, and it included philosophical concepts such as the Nguni Bantu idea of Ubuntu in moral philosophy, which stresses the interconnectedness of individuals within a community. Philosophers recorded in this atlas are grouped here when their work belongs to the African philosophical tradition taken as a whole, rather than to one named school within it such as Sage Philosophy or Ubuntu Philosophy.