Overview

Introductory and critical overview of African philosophical hermeneutics African philosophical hermeneutics has emerged in response to the predicaments of post-colonial African societies. Its central premise is that practical responses have a lot to gain from interpreting people’s experience of meaning and the disruption of it. But where does understanding originate from? And what are the possibilities and limitations of interpretation as support for practice? Suspended in the tension between Africa’s traumatic past and people’s continuing quest for autonomy, African hermeneutics draws on old traditions, adopted ideas and creative reflection. This results in intense intellectual engagement with history and conflict, translation and human nature, epistemic domination and liberation. This book explores the role of hermeneutics in African philosophy. By examining its leading thinkers, it offers stimulating perspectives for any reader grappling with interpretation, critique, pluralism, decolonization and politics – in Africa and elsewhere.

Full Product Details

Author:   Ernst Wolff (Professor of Philosophy, KU Leuven & University of Pretoria)
Publisher:   Leuven University Press
Imprint:   Leuven University Press
Weight:   0.454kg
ISBN:  

9789462704831

ISBN 10:   946270483
Pages:   280
Publication Date:   15 October 2025
Audience:   College/higher education ,  Postgraduate, Research & Scholarly
Format:   Paperback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   In Print  
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Table of Contents

Preface. Approaching African hermeneutics Chapter 1. Introduction: Hermeneutics as a trend in African philosophy 1. Hermeneutics: a provisional description 2. The place of hermeneutics in African philosophy 2.1. The place of hermeneutics in African philosophy: using Oruka as a point of departure 2.2. The place of hermeneutics in African philosophy: using Nkombe and Smet as a point of departure 2.3. Preliminary conclusions 3. Hermeneutics: an author-based approach Chapter 2. On the threshold: from cultural philosophemes to African hermeneutics —Theophilus Okere 1. African philosophy: a historic-hermeneutic investigation of the conditions of its possibility 2. What is non-philosophy? 2.1. Culture from the view of ethnophilosophy and its critics 2.2. Culture as a non-philosophical component of European philosophy 3. What is philosophy? 3.1. The conditions of the possibility of philosophy 3.2. From the philosophical crossroads to the possibility of African philosophy 4. How should philosophy and non-philosophy be linked? 4.1. Working on philosophemes 4.2. Towards a traditionalist or a contextualist view of belonging to a culture? 5. Conclusion Select annotated bibliography Chapter 3. Interpretation as a resource for political resistance : Serequeberhan between generality and particularity 1. The source: general anthropological claims 2. Philosophy in general 3. All humans and all philosophy 4. African philosophy 4.1. Critique: what is to be avoided 4.2. Advocacy: what is to be pursued 5. Improper African philosophy: self-imposed negation of historicalness in Nkrumah and Senghor 5.1. Nkrumah: pathology of extroverted Euro-normativity 5.2. Senghor: pathology of introverted or internalised Euro-normativity 5.3. On the unintentional servants of European Enlightenment 6. A new start: from horizon to hermeneutic discourse 6.1. Horizon and vocation 6.2. According mediations their due: expanding and transcending the lived horizon 6.3. Tradition 6.4. Actuality and ideality: normativity and liberation 7. From horizon to action 7.1. Original violence with Césaire 7.2. “[Counter-]Violence is no choice” (but a matter of necessity) 7.3. Fusion of horizons and practices of freedom: with Fanon and Cabral 8. Conclusion Select annotated bibliography Chapter 4. Critique of African hermeneutic reason : interpretation triggered and oriented by praxis—Okolo Okonda 1. Orientation: praxis, hermeneutics, tradition 2. Praxis, crisis, development 2.1. Crisis 2.2. Development as “revolutionary praxis”? 3. Hermeneutics 3.1. “Every theory of reading presupposes a theory of text and vice versa” 3.2. “Every reading is oriented toward some kind of appropriation/re-taking [reprise]” 3.3. “Every reading and every appropriation is determined by a worldview of the subject who reads and appropriates [or re-takes]” 4. Tradition 4.1. Tradition as text 4.2. Tradition and the difficult balance between the “already there” and the “not yet” 4.3. What is co-extensive with tradition: worldview, ideology, identity 4.4. Provisional conclusion on tradition, worldviews, ideology, and identity 5. Critique of hermeneutic reason: shifting perspectives and complexity as a virtue 6. Ethnophilosophy: contra … and pro 7. Orality 7.1. Proverbs 7.2. Conclusions on orality 8. Work, critique, and violence 9. Philosophy, singular and universal: the ambition of Okolo’s book 10. Conclusion Select annotated bibliography Chapter 5. Implicit hermeneutics: origins, constitutions, projects 1. History versus essentialism as a resource for action in the present: Cheikh Anta Diop 1.1. From language, through history, to action 1.2. Aspects of a Diopian hermeneutics 2. Critical traditionalism and contemporary social problems: Sophie Oluwole 2.1. Orality as the core of African philosophy 2.2. Strengths and weaknesses of Oluwole’s hermeneutics 3. How truth claims about Africa came to be: V. Y. Mudimbe 3.1. Making truth claims about Africa (and what this is a sign of) 3.2. The variety of Africanist discourses 3.3. Reconstructing invention—archaeology as hermeneutics 4. A hermeneutics of total defeat and the small deviations: Fabien Eboussi Boulaga 4.1. Orientation: philosophy by and for Muntu 4.2. Hermeneutics as a critical unmasking 4.3. Hermeneutics as interpretation of the conditions of self-liberation 4.4. Hermeneutics as transfunctionalisation and self-affirmation 4.5. Conclusion 5. Translation as making humanity together: Souleymane Bachir Diagne 5.1. Point of departure: connecting the foreign and the familiar 5.2. The translator as agent 5.3. Translatio as transfer: transplanting works of art and translatio studii 5.4. Particularity, universalism, and the ethics of translation 5.5. Conclusions and questions 6. Conclusion: a wide perspective on what hermeneutics can do Select annotated bibliography Chapter 6. Conclusion: hermeneutics as commitment 1. Hermeneutics and philosophical anthropology 1.1. Understanding, belonging, culture 1.2. Arts of interpretation 1.3. Philosophical hermeneutics 2. Negotiating plurality 2.1. Hermeneutics’ two aversions and its founding conviction 2.2. Generality as supposition and the practical commitment of hermeneutics 2.3. Hermeneutic resources: an ethics of listening and diverse “procedures of the spirit” 2.4. Hermeneutic resources: critique and creativity 3. Between familiarity and strangeness 3.1. Familiarity and strangeness: the struggle for orientation 3.2. African philosophy as a compound of familiarity and strangeness 4. Hermeneutics and practice: liberation from what? What for? By whom? 4.1. Hermeneutics as rooted and participating in practice 4.2. Practice and power 4.3. The spectrum of practical engagement 4.4. Understanding the ambiguous practical profile of hermeneutics: ambition and self-restraint 5. Hermeneutics and ethics 6. Hermeneutics among the strategies for liberating the world Notes Index

Reviews

This important book provides readers with a critical and vivid account of hermeneutics as a means of cultural and political liberation in African philosophy. First, Ernst Wolff presents the nature of hermeneutics and assesses its role in African philosophical traditions. Second, he offers a fresh and thoughtful reading of some of its major representatives. Combining rigorous argumentation with a rare clarity of expression, this well-researched and brilliantly written book will be of enormous value and significance to students and scholars of philosophy and the social sciences. - Kasereka Kavwahirehi, University of Ottawa Ernst Wolff has written a book that vastly expands the boundaries of African Philosophy by doing what is rarely done in the discipline: taking seriously the ideas and discourses of individual African thinkers and engaging them at the most granular level. Henceforth, it is impossible for anyone who practices or writes about hermeneutics as a philosophical method and mode of thinking to claim ignorance of Africans’ place in it. With sophisticated analysis, brilliant summaries that never dumb down the complexities of his chosen thinkers’ arguments, and critical sections that invite deeper conversation with the authors and their readers alike, Wolff introduces us to both self-identified hermeneuticists and others whose works lend themselves to hermeneutic interpretation. He has made us abundantly aware of the riches that await questors into one branch of African philosophy: Hermeneutics. I give this book my highest recommendation. - Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò, Cornell University Interpretation for Liberation: African Philosophical Hermeneutics is a seminal work by Ernst Wolff. Rich and informed, it provides a pedagogical introduction to the nature and function of hermeneutics as a trend in philosophical practice in general and African philosophy in particular. But where hermeneutics as practiced by ethnophilosophers confines African consciousness to the mystified absolutes of Abrahamic monotheisms, his secular vision of this field finds expression in the thesis: hermeneutics means that human existence has a meaning that calls for an understanding of its varied significances. The author's effort to flesh out an uncertain and even contested academic position in African philosophy is admirable. In his view, this strand of African philosophy attempts to grasp the repercussions and aftermath of socio-historical crises linked to the economic, cultural, and political difficulties of a humanity confronted over the long term with residual forms of inhuman violence and geopolitical power relations resulting from the slave trade, slavery, colonial conquest, oppression, and underdevelopment, from which nevertheless emerges an irrepressible desire for emancipation and self-affirmation. Ernst Wolff conceptualizes from this a humanist ethic, that of a fulfilled and better life together without doing violence to human diversity. Ernst Wolff uses this as a basis for conceptualizing a humanist ethic, that of a fulfilled and better life together without doing violence to human diversity. Focusing on a single author at a time, through a detailed analysis of a philosophical text (author-based approach), the analysis of African hermeneutics is presented as a quest for intercultural dialogue. E. Wolff's methodology also demonstrates a scientific ethic of generosity, humility, and refusal to humiliate. Whether part of an explicit hermeneutic or not, this method appears to E. Wolff as a political resource for resistance. These are therefore situated and contextualized philosophies that seek to make intelligible the constant change in culture, language, social relations, politics, as well as in the objects of interpretation and understanding of everyday existence. This gives this method a rooting in practical life as it is part of a sociopolitical reality. Once engaged with meaning, the act of understanding, the arts of interpretation, and hermeneutics have a connection to power. - Charles Mbele, Université de Yaoundé 1

*Interpretation for Liberation is an exceptionally stimulating and timely contribution to the debate on the African practice of philosophical hermeneutics. Reading the works of Theophilus Okre, Tsenay Serequeberban, Okolo Okonda, and others, the author introduces his readers to the development of the African tradition of philosophical hermeneutics and its challengers.* - Kasereka Kavwahirehi, University of Ottawa This important book provides readers with a critical and vivid account of hermeneutics as a means of cultural and political liberation in African philosophy. First, Ernst Wolff presents the nature of hermeneutics and assesses its role in African philosophical traditions. Second, he offers a fresh and thoughtful reading of some of its major representatives. Combining rigorous argumentation with a rare clarity of expression, this well-researched and brilliantly written book will be of enormous value and significance to students and scholars of philosophy and the social sciences. - Kasereka Kavwahirehi, University of Ottawa Ernst Wolff has written a book that vastly expands the boundaries of African Philosophy by doing what is rarely done in the discipline: taking seriously the ideas and discourses of individual African thinkers and engaging them at the most granular level. Henceforth, it is impossible for anyone who practices or writes about hermeneutics as a philosophical method and mode of thinking to claim ignorance of Africans’ place in it. With sophisticated analysis, brilliant summaries that never dumb down the complexities of his chosen thinkers’ arguments, and critical sections that invite deeper conversation with the authors and their readers alike, Wolff introduces us to both self-identified hermeneuticists and others whose works lend themselves to hermeneutic interpretation. He has made us abundantly aware of the riches that await questors into one branch of African philosophy: Hermeneutics. I give this book my highest recommendation. - Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò, Cornell University

This important book provides readers with a critical and vivid account of hermeneutics as a means of cultural and political liberation in African philosophy. First, Ernst Wolff presents the nature of hermeneutics and assesses its role in African philosophical traditions. Second, he offers a fresh and thoughtful reading of some of its major representatives. Combining rigorous argumentation with a rare clarity of expression, this well-researched and brilliantly written book will be of enormous value and significance to students and scholars of philosophy and the social sciences. - Kasereka Kavwahirehi, University of Ottawa Ernst Wolff has written a book that vastly expands the boundaries of African Philosophy by doing what is rarely done in the discipline: taking seriously the ideas and discourses of individual African thinkers and engaging them at the most granular level. Henceforth, it is impossible for anyone who practices or writes about hermeneutics as a philosophical method and mode of thinking to claim ignorance of Africans’ place in it. With sophisticated analysis, brilliant summaries that never dumb down the complexities of his chosen thinkers’ arguments, and critical sections that invite deeper conversation with the authors and their readers alike, Wolff introduces us to both self-identified hermeneuticists and others whose works lend themselves to hermeneutic interpretation. He has made us abundantly aware of the riches that await questors into one branch of African philosophy: Hermeneutics. I give this book my highest recommendation. - Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò, Cornell University

Author Information

Ernst Wolff is professor at the Institute of Philosophy at the KU Leuven.

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