Western Philosophies

The major focus of this paper is to make a comparative analysis between African and Western Philosophies with a view to unravel some of the hidden truths in them as well as establishing that African philosophy is capable of being recognised as philosophy with its distinct nature, scope and contents. The paper equally emphasises that the distinctive elements in African philosophy such as proverbs, folktales and others are capable of being studied like its sister philosophies such as oriented and Western philosophies. The paper posits that African philosophy is not culture-bound as it is being studied in other continents of the world. It (the paper) construes that Africans must jettison any thought of cultural insularity and focus attention on becoming a part of the cultural interdependence that marks the global community today. It is imperative for African scholars not to seek after a romantic glorification of the African ‘unanalytic cast of mind ` or anything that locks the African into the archival past, but rather there should be a conscious and critical appropriation of the relevant aspects of other cultures that are of great significance for modern living. The method of analysis was employed in developing this paper. The paper concludes that there should be a genuine and mutually symbiotic cultural interaction and exchange between the west and African given the reality of the globalisation phenomenon